LABELS - The Thread!

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

No, it doesn't make the outside world different, but validating my feelings makes responding easier. Otherwise, it's hard to shake the feeling that my response will be out of proportion. *shrug*

FUCKING PHONE. HOUSE PHONE RANG AND BUMPED THE INTERNET JUST AS I POSTED.


Short form: violence doesn't come easy to women, since we're trained to not hit ever, never be aggressive. Men, especially older men gone to seed, are stronger and have a lot more weight. The terror there is if the guy is serious, there is nothing we can do to stop it coming. Nothing.

And then I had an example of tough as nails torch being so manipulated by shayne that she couldn't have fended him off with an army behind her.

This. And I am not a small person, but scared monkey doesn't calculate that very well.

FUCKING PHONE. HOUSE PHONE RANG AND BUMPED THE INTERNET JUST AS I POSTED.


Short form: violence doesn't come easy to women, since we're trained to not hit ever, never be aggressive. Men, especially older men gone to seed, are stronger and have a lot more weight. The terror there is if the guy is serious, there is nothing we can do to stop it coming. Nothing.

And then I had an example of tough as nails torch being so manipulated by shayne that she couldn't have fended him off with an army behind her.

That's something that can come up when they get you alone. If by some chance I got cornered in some isolated place by somebody I had reason to think would kill me and probably get away with it, it's another ballgame. In a bar, or any place where there's witnesses, we have an edge.

I was in a situation where it was ALL older men, remember. The side walk was empty (and this bar is tucked away off the main street, which is part of why I like it), bartender was an older dude, too, etc.

The bartender isn't going to let anything happen. Part of his job is not letting the Liquor Control Board or whatever it's called in your state shut the place down. If somebody who's been sitting there drinking starts harrassing a woman who just walked in, guess who's getting thrown out? I'd have bellied right up to the bar in that situation.

Yes. The bartender is ALWAYS your friend. And you know, even if the bartender secretly isn't really on your side (but they usually are; every one I've met has been) one thing they really, really don't want is the cops showing up.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Wow. This was a spectacularly shitty way to prove a point. Bad, bad example. Sorry Roger. D:

But anyway, women spend their entire lives trying to stay safe (go find Pixie's comment string in OH NOEZ on the subject, since I have effectively proven myself to be neurotic). We're socialized to deal with Schrodinger's rapist (we have no idea who is and who is not, but we have to prevent him from doing it anyway).
That's not something men have to live with. You can empathize, but you don't actually live with a perpetual, low-level fear of rape.

You might or might not have thought of this by this point, since I'm obviously just catching up on this thread, but you're implying that perpetual fear of rape is somehow different than perpetual fear of any number of other horrifying things. You don't have to be a woman and have had the specific fear of rape to understand EXACTLY how it feels to be constantly fearful.

But are there things -- and I'm not being facetious, I'm generally unsure -- that men generally have to fear that women generally don't have to fear? And I am speaking in general, all-other-things-being-equal terms.

Men can absolutely understand how it feels to be constantly fearful, I'm not arguing that point at all. I'm just wondering whether or not women in a particular socio-economic group are constantly fearful of everything men are in that same socio-economic group, with the added fear of the possibility of being raped.

Okay, women are now up by 1 point.

Score stands at:

Men:  89,000,000 fears.
Women:  89,000,001 fears.

Wasn't really the point of my post, but okay. I was just trying to figure out where ECM was coming from.

But anyway, I do that that a perpetual fear of rape is different to a perpetual fear of other things. But so is a perpetual fear of violent (non-sexual) assault. Or a perpetual fear of earthquakes. A perpetual and genuine fear of any one thing is going to be different to a perpetual and genuine fear of any other thing. Anyone can understand what it feels like to be constantly fearful, but not everyone can understand what it's like to be fearful of that specific thing.

Indian men in North Dakota stand an absolutely insanely disproportionate chance of being murdered. I am horrified by this, I feel awful about it, I can try to put myself in those shoes based on my internal comparison with how it feels to be always on guard against assault, but I don't really know what it's like because I've really never experienced anything quite like it. It sounds horrible.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

I didn't say it was worse. I said it was different.

It's beginning to sound like a cause.

Feminism/eglatarianism isn't a cause, it's a behavior.  When it becomes a cause, it becomes the "ism" instead of the beneficial thing it started out to be.  It becomes a uniform that you put on, button up REAL tight around your throat, and then stomp around in, demanding that your ism gets all the due recognition it deserves.

But here's the problem:  In addition to losing the actual value of the behavior, you also induce emotional fatigue in those around you.  It's not that people want to stop caring, it's that they become weary of hearing the same thing being bellowed over and over again, and they CAN'T keep caring.

After 911, there was about a 2 year period in which ~ 80% of the population was scared into a national nervous breakdown.  People were fucking TERRIFIED right out of their rational minds.  By 2004, however, they were losing the capability of remaining scared, and by the Detroit attempt in 2009, everyone was laughing at the idiot terrorist that burned his junk off.

So now we're having "privilege" and "rape" repeatedly being brought up to the exclusion of any other facet of the whole feminism/eglatarianism conversation.  It's been addressed to death, brought back to life, clubbed back into it's grave, dug up, and hauled through the village streets.  These two facets of the conversation have become the ENTIRE conversation, and there's nothing more to be said about it...And they've taken the REST of the ideas with them.

In fact, it's turned "addressed from privilege" from a valid concern to what is being perceived as a means of shutting down disagreement, even if that was never the intent.

So at this point I have to ask if there's anything more to talk about, because if it's going to continue to be about privilege and rape, I'd like to leave the conversations/threads while I still have any capacity for outrage on these subjects at all.

For God's sake, BUMP.

Maybe because those are two points on which people still feel they are not being heard. That's usually the case when issues keep resurfacing.

[Placid Dingo]

I think rather than stating it as an affirmation, you could state it as a question:

"Can one make use of labels/titles without becoming them?"

Making a reference to your current project as an example, I dont label myself a discordian; "im" not a discordian, i have use for discordian thought, i emphatize with the metaphor of discordia, but "im not a".

Why? Because just as in any group or within any label, there are the "crazies", nutjobs that i dont want to be identified with, Uncle BadTouch the pedophile (or was it Clockwerk? im not sure), or some guy that murdered a person for fame discussed recently that used to post here.

I enjoy hanging out with "goths" and they are what i might consider my "brethren" or whatever, but IM NOT a goth, because in any group there are "crazies", etc.

I am male, I am heterosexual, I am tall, but if someone asks me "What am i?" am i gonna say "Well, gee, Im tall"? What the fuck would that even mean?

Ideas and representations are things that i think and i can emphatize with (or be opposed) but they are not the same thing as "being".

Im nothing, im everything - when someone categorizes there is intent that is socio-politically charged.

Well put. However for me it is an affirmation. I do believe it one can use labels without becoming the label.

It seems odd to not identify with a group because of nut jobs. It's not like any (sane) person hates on Richard Dawkins because of Mao Tse Tung (though of course this could just be because theres much better reasons to hate on Dawkins).

Actually speaking of Dawkins, the Brights movement is a good example of a lable used to compress a complex set of ideas into something thats simple enough to spread.

It's also a perfect example of the trap of labels. The Brights may have all the "right" values, but the very name of the group is so fucking arrogant and off-putting that it makes me want to smear poop all over their bedsheets just for having the temerity to call themselves that. And I'm the very pinnacle of logic and reason. There are no shortage of monkeys who would find it just as insulting as I do and wouldn't hesitate to actively oppose those values just to spite some effete leftist asshole.

Yes, good point.

Also thanks Nigel for replying and everyone for a damn good discussion. And I'm liking seeing more of Sita.

This concludes my Friendship is Magic announcement. Please return to your scheduled conversations.

[Pope Pixie Pickle]

Regarding garbo's first point in reply #149:

Oh holy shit.  That needs a thread all on it's own.

Even decent human beings buy the whole "You're a woman, and I don't understand why you're being so emotional, ergo you are overreacting."

Everybody does it and it is always bullshit. Everybody, even ourselves, which feeds into doubting our perceptions, and gives credence to victim blaming, and arrgh arrgh arrgh arrgh arrgh.

Also, Torch doesn't afraid to beat the shit out of people.

Then start one.

I'd probably title it something like "Bitches be Crazy? :/"

[P3nT4gR4m]

I'm not an expert on anthropology or anything, but I think you'll find that strong people will make the world we wish we had.

THIS²

Strong people are the only ones capable of behaving like everyone is saying people should behave like "if the world was different"

Strong people don't wait for the world to be different. They're strong enough not to need it to be.

Strong people aren't necessarily born that way.

[Verbal Mike]

As usual, the thread's gone off on a totally different tangent by the time I managed to catch up, but FWIW:

It seems to me like a lot of this discussion on labels is falling into a trap, a misperception really, of the relation between the words we use and the structure of our thoughts.

Some of you may know the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, which, to generalize – there are a few versions – says that the language(s) you speak shape(s) habits and structures of thought. One very strong version of SWH would be that your thoughts are limited to that which you can express in your native language(s). Even though this idea has gained a lot of traction in a pop-sci kind of way (think of Orwell's concept of Newspeak and its purpose) linguists have basically mostly moved away from SWH altogether. There is some new and fascinating research based on a very moderate SWH (basically, that language affects cognitive processes, but only a little and not in very important ways - like how we perceive differences in colors). Strong versions of SWH are ridiculously easy to falsify – just try to recall the last time you wanted to say something but had a hard time finding quite the right words. That this is even possible basically invalidates strong SWH: If your thoughts were structured using your language (or mirroring it), you would have thought the words in some less-than-conscious way and had no problem simply sending that information to your brain's language centers for making into sounds/letters/signs.

Of course having a label for something makes it easier to relate thoughts to that group of things/people/experiences, and makes it easier to think in a way that over-generalizes, simply by giving you a linguistic anchor to attach a bunch of thoughts to. But adopting a term or label for yourself or for others does not mahdjickully make you less sensitive to diversity amongst entities carrying that label. At most it, makes particular sentences you say less sensitive to it.

Seems like a few people keep saying that using a label for some group of people somehow forces you to oversimplify in thinking about them. It really doesn't. It doesn't even force you to oversimplify when you're talking, since you can THINK FOR YOURSELF and consciously choose when to use a generalization. Which is incidentally why it is appropriate to take someone to task when they abuse a label or use it to abuse someone.

But having the label doesn't force you to think using it to the exclusion of subtlety. It just doesn't make any fucking sense. I don't categorically reject the use of the term "Jew", though I do seriously take issue with it being applied to me in irrelevant ways. My family is Jewish and almost everyone I knew growing up is, and I can appreciate, reflect upon, and discuss the many intricacies of Jewish life, Jewishness, and Jewish history. I use the term Jew(ish) carefully because I am aware of these intricacies, but I sure as hell often end up using it, e.g. in describing political situations in Israel.

In just that way, I am GLAD for a label like "cis" allowing me to speak about a certain group of people/experiences when it is expedient, relevant, fair, and non-violent. Again we're talking about a label which could reasonably be applied to me – when it's expedient, relevant, fair, and non-violent. Having this word in my vocabulary does not make me forget that being cisgender itself has quite a lot of diversity to it, that there can be totally different cisgender people. It actually helps reflect on that, in thought and in conversation. Just like being able to reflect on Jews as a historical and contemporary group-entity allows me to pay attention to particular differences between entities within them. Having to say "the collection of religious groupings historically and/or spiritually associated with the Hebrews described in a particular set of canons of religious texts referred to within these groupings as the Bible" makes it pretty damn inconvenient to even being thinking about what is unique about the different religious groupings and the different individuals comprising them. Which is, again, analogous to having to talk/think using such strings as "people who self-identify with their biological sex (or is it asigned gender?)" when discussing/reflecting on how different life is for different sub-groupings and individuals with that definition.

TL;DR: New words are useful for giving serious attention to things you weren't previously used to referring to. They do not automatically become a bar.


On an entirely tangential note:

... some guy that murdered a person for fame discussed recently that used to post here.
...

Say what now? Who what whaaa??

[Placid Dingo]

Not entirely accurate. He came and spammed his wobsite on one page.

[Signora Pæsior]

As usual, the thread's gone off on a totally different tangent by the time I managed to catch up, but FWIW:

It seems to me like a lot of this discussion on labels is falling into a trap, a misperception really, of the relation between the words we use and the structure of our thoughts.

Some of you may know the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, which, to generalize – there are a few versions – says that the language(s) you speak shape(s) habits and structures of thought. One very strong version of SWH would be that your thoughts are limited to that which you can express in your native language(s). Even though this idea has gained a lot of traction in a pop-sci kind of way (think of Orwell's concept of Newspeak and its purpose) linguists have basically mostly moved away from SWH altogether. There is some new and fascinating research based on a very moderate SWH (basically, that language affects cognitive processes, but only a little and not in very important ways - like how we perceive differences in colors). Strong versions of SWH are ridiculously easy to falsify – just try to recall the last time you wanted to say something but had a hard time finding quite the right words. That this is even possible basically invalidates strong SWH: If your thoughts were structured using your language (or mirroring it), you would have thought the words in some less-than-conscious way and had no problem simply sending that information to your brain's language centers for making into sounds/letters/signs.

Of course having a label for something makes it easier to relate thoughts to that group of things/people/experiences, and makes it easier to think in a way that over-generalizes, simply by giving you a linguistic anchor to attach a bunch of thoughts to. But adopting a term or label for yourself or for others does not mahdjickully make you less sensitive to diversity amongst entities carrying that label. At most it, makes particular sentences you say less sensitive to it.

Seems like a few people keep saying that using a label for some group of people somehow forces you to oversimplify in thinking about them. It really doesn't. It doesn't even force you to oversimplify when you're talking, since you can THINK FOR YOURSELF and consciously choose when to use a generalization. Which is incidentally why it is appropriate to take someone to task when they abuse a label or use it to abuse someone.

But having the label doesn't force you to think using it to the exclusion of subtlety. It just doesn't make any fucking sense. I don't categorically reject the use of the term "Jew", though I do seriously take issue with it being applied to me in irrelevant ways. My family is Jewish and almost everyone I knew growing up is, and I can appreciate, reflect upon, and discuss the many intricacies of Jewish life, Jewishness, and Jewish history. I use the term Jew(ish) carefully because I am aware of these intricacies, but I sure as hell often end up using it, e.g. in describing political situations in Israel.

In just that way, I am GLAD for a label like "cis" allowing me to speak about a certain group of people/experiences when it is expedient, relevant, fair, and non-violent. Again we're talking about a label which could reasonably be applied to me – when it's expedient, relevant, fair, and non-violent. Having this word in my vocabulary does not make me forget that being cisgender itself has quite a lot of diversity to it, that there can be totally different cisgender people. It actually helps reflect on that, in thought and in conversation. Just like being able to reflect on Jews as a historical and contemporary group-entity allows me to pay attention to particular differences between entities within them. Having to say "the collection of religious groupings historically and/or spiritually associated with the Hebrews described in a particular set of canons of religious texts referred to within these groupings as the Bible" makes it pretty damn inconvenient to even being thinking about what is unique about the different religious groupings and the different individuals comprising them. Which is, again, analogous to having to talk/think using such strings as "people who self-identify with their biological sex (or is it asigned gender?)" when discussing/reflecting on how different life is for different sub-groupings and individuals with that definition.

TL;DR: New words are useful for giving serious attention to things you weren't previously used to referring to. They do not automatically become a bar.

This whole comment is very, very good.

[Verbal Mike]

 

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

... some guy that murdered a person for fame discussed recently that used to post here.
...

Say what now? Who what whaaa??

What ever happened with that guy, anyway?

[The Good Reverend Roger]

I didn't say it was worse. I said it was different.

It's beginning to sound like a cause.

Feminism/eglatarianism isn't a cause, it's a behavior.  When it becomes a cause, it becomes the "ism" instead of the beneficial thing it started out to be.  It becomes a uniform that you put on, button up REAL tight around your throat, and then stomp around in, demanding that your ism gets all the due recognition it deserves.

But here's the problem:  In addition to losing the actual value of the behavior, you also induce emotional fatigue in those around you.  It's not that people want to stop caring, it's that they become weary of hearing the same thing being bellowed over and over again, and they CAN'T keep caring.

After 911, there was about a 2 year period in which ~ 80% of the population was scared into a national nervous breakdown.  People were fucking TERRIFIED right out of their rational minds.  By 2004, however, they were losing the capability of remaining scared, and by the Detroit attempt in 2009, everyone was laughing at the idiot terrorist that burned his junk off.

So now we're having "privilege" and "rape" repeatedly being brought up to the exclusion of any other facet of the whole feminism/eglatarianism conversation.  It's been addressed to death, brought back to life, clubbed back into it's grave, dug up, and hauled through the village streets.  These two facets of the conversation have become the ENTIRE conversation, and there's nothing more to be said about it...And they've taken the REST of the ideas with them.

In fact, it's turned "addressed from privilege" from a valid concern to what is being perceived as a means of shutting down disagreement, even if that was never the intent.

So at this point I have to ask if there's anything more to talk about, because if it's going to continue to be about privilege and rape, I'd like to leave the conversations/threads while I still have any capacity for outrage on these subjects at all.

For God's sake, BUMP.

Maybe because those are two points on which people still feel they are not being heard. That's usually the case when issues keep resurfacing.

I had an insight on this whole thing, but it's gone now.

3 threads all turn into the same two things over and over again.  Might be that people aren't being heard.  Might also be that they don't have anything else to say on the subject.

In any case, I'll return to the conversation later.

[Anna Mae Bollocks]

I didn't say it was worse. I said it was different.

It's beginning to sound like a cause.

Feminism/eglatarianism isn't a cause, it's a behavior.  When it becomes a cause, it becomes the "ism" instead of the beneficial thing it started out to be.  It becomes a uniform that you put on, button up REAL tight around your throat, and then stomp around in, demanding that your ism gets all the due recognition it deserves.

But here's the problem:  In addition to losing the actual value of the behavior, you also induce emotional fatigue in those around you.  It's not that people want to stop caring, it's that they become weary of hearing the same thing being bellowed over and over again, and they CAN'T keep caring.

After 911, there was about a 2 year period in which ~ 80% of the population was scared into a national nervous breakdown.  People were fucking TERRIFIED right out of their rational minds.  By 2004, however, they were losing the capability of remaining scared, and by the Detroit attempt in 2009, everyone was laughing at the idiot terrorist that burned his junk off.

So now we're having "privilege" and "rape" repeatedly being brought up to the exclusion of any other facet of the whole feminism/eglatarianism conversation.  It's been addressed to death, brought back to life, clubbed back into it's grave, dug up, and hauled through the village streets.  These two facets of the conversation have become the ENTIRE conversation, and there's nothing more to be said about it...And they've taken the REST of the ideas with them.

In fact, it's turned "addressed from privilege" from a valid concern to what is being perceived as a means of shutting down disagreement, even if that was never the intent.

So at this point I have to ask if there's anything more to talk about, because if it's going to continue to be about privilege and rape, I'd like to leave the conversations/threads while I still have any capacity for outrage on these subjects at all.

For God's sake, BUMP.

Maybe because those are two points on which people still feel they are not being heard. That's usually the case when issues keep resurfacing.

I had an insight on this whole thing, but it's gone now.

3 threads all turn into the same two things over and over again.  Might be that people aren't being heard.  Might also be that they don't have anything else to say on the subject.

In any case, I'll return to the conversation later.

I vote "don't have anything else to say on the subject'...it's been kinda going in circles.

[Placid Dingo]

... some guy that murdered a person for fame discussed recently that used to post here.
...

Say what now? Who what whaaa??

What ever happened with that guy, anyway?

Preliminary hearing in March 2013.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

I didn't say it was worse. I said it was different.

It's beginning to sound like a cause.

Feminism/eglatarianism isn't a cause, it's a behavior.  When it becomes a cause, it becomes the "ism" instead of the beneficial thing it started out to be.  It becomes a uniform that you put on, button up REAL tight around your throat, and then stomp around in, demanding that your ism gets all the due recognition it deserves.

But here's the problem:  In addition to losing the actual value of the behavior, you also induce emotional fatigue in those around you.  It's not that people want to stop caring, it's that they become weary of hearing the same thing being bellowed over and over again, and they CAN'T keep caring.

After 911, there was about a 2 year period in which ~ 80% of the population was scared into a national nervous breakdown.  People were fucking TERRIFIED right out of their rational minds.  By 2004, however, they were losing the capability of remaining scared, and by the Detroit attempt in 2009, everyone was laughing at the idiot terrorist that burned his junk off.

So now we're having "privilege" and "rape" repeatedly being brought up to the exclusion of any other facet of the whole feminism/eglatarianism conversation.  It's been addressed to death, brought back to life, clubbed back into it's grave, dug up, and hauled through the village streets.  These two facets of the conversation have become the ENTIRE conversation, and there's nothing more to be said about it...And they've taken the REST of the ideas with them.

In fact, it's turned "addressed from privilege" from a valid concern to what is being perceived as a means of shutting down disagreement, even if that was never the intent.

So at this point I have to ask if there's anything more to talk about, because if it's going to continue to be about privilege and rape, I'd like to leave the conversations/threads while I still have any capacity for outrage on these subjects at all.

For God's sake, BUMP.

Maybe because those are two points on which people still feel they are not being heard. That's usually the case when issues keep resurfacing.

I had an insight on this whole thing, but it's gone now.

3 threads all turn into the same two things over and over again.  Might be that people aren't being heard.  Might also be that they don't have anything else to say on the subject.

In any case, I'll return to the conversation later.

I kinda disagree with you on the "don't have anything else to say on the subject" issue. What I, personally, keep noticing is that a recurring trend is that when men talk about their experiences, people tend to say "It sucks that you were treated that way; here is why the other person might have acted that way" and when women talk about their experiences, people tend to say "This is what you should do/think differently".

I think that kind of response tends to put people on the defensive, and then the conversation gets taken over by the debate about women's experiences.