Sophia/Idris, he/they | jewish & agnostic | fictionkin | certified Freak (TM) | discourse blog: discourse-and-suffering, kin blog: sword-of-darkness | anyone is free to interact, but it's your own fault if you do
As with many disciplines, kindness may come more easily to some than to others. But it is nonetheless something you can learn, something you can teach, something you can work at.
Literally the reason slurs are what they are is because of the systemic force behind them. An oppressor using a slur is reminding you that they consider you subhuman and is an inherent threat.
Someone who also experiences that oppression using that word for themselves is not doing that. Someone in your community calling themselves the same word that gets thrown at you is not them threatening you or calling you subhuman - it’s literally the exact fucking opposite. They’re saying “I’m one of you” and “I consider people who get called this to be human because I AM ONE”
You cannot act like the two are in any way comparable without *actively rejecting the community that is trying to welcome you*. You’re saying “no, that word IS for subhumans and I’m not one of you because I’m better than that” and that attitude can get fucked.
favorite thing about tumblr is when someone gets a 1k post you don’t see them plugging their soundcloud/youtube/insta in the comments like tumblr fame gets u literally nothing
When someone disagrees with you online and demands you prove your point to their satisfaction by writing a complete and logically sound defense including citations, you can save a lot of time by not doing that.
Bro, I’ve known you for twelve seconds and enjoyed none of them, I’m not taking homework assignments from you.
This got a lot of responses from people pointing out that evidence is a key part of intellectual inquiry, discourse, and debate. That being able to support your beliefs is a key critical thinking skill. Which is 100% true.
Except that you don’t actually have to participate in intellectual discourse any time some fucko on the Internet tells you to.
There’s a vast difference between “this is an important thing to be able to do,” and “this is a thing that you must be continuously available to perform in public for any stranger who asks.”
Call yourself anticapitalist/socialist/liberal/woke/whatever but if you’re not nice to regular people on a moment to moment basis your politics are basically worthless.
“yeah see uhhh i love the pocs trans rights haha” *is the most abrasive and hateful person you’ve ever met*
it’s absurd, the amount of time and energy it takes to refute good propaganda. well made shit packs so many layers of assumptions and conclusions into a single paragraph, or a single sentence, that it ends up takes multiple pages of refutation to unravel.
leftists, progressives, and especially revolutionary queer activists NEED to get better at making good propaganda.
a lot of us are too concerned with being perfectly nuanced and perfectly factual to be pithy or make good propaganda, and that’s how we keep losing these fights. that’s how we keep getting teens in queer space telling other queer people to kill themselves for being freaks, or unironically saying that human rights are a scam that child molesters came up with to let them rape children.
good propaganda doesn’t concern itself with factuality. it can be factual, sure! and progressive propaganda should be factual!
but facts are not the tool being used.
emotions are. leading questions are.
propaganda is about getting someone to agree that you are right first, then explaining to them how and why you are right later, once they’re open to it because they already agree that you’re right.
propaganda is a shortcut.
and we need to start taking it.
The word you are looking for is not propaganda, and if it is, the answer is no. No, no, absolutely fucking not.
What we should be doing? Teaching skills to RESIST propaganda. To instill in people a desire to know the truth and understand nuance.
What we should also be doing? Crafting good thesis statements, headlines, emotion-grabbing things—but not stopping there. Still focusing on facts, and nuance, which I would like to point out, ARE NOT THINGS USED IN PROPAGANDA, that is not what propaganda means.
propaganda isn’t a dirty word. propaganda isn’t evil.
the problem is, when only evil people use propaganda, then it becomes associated with evil.
and thus, people agitating for human rights and progress are left without a critical persuasive tool.
propaganda is the selective presentation of facts to make your conclusion seem obvious.
you know the phrase, ‘trans rights are human rights’?
that’s propaganda.
and i struggle to see how it’s immoral or indefensible.
here are some other examples of progressive propaganda.
a graphic titled, “how to distinguish capitalism from corporatism, a guide for libertarians.” the left image shows uncle sam and a rich businessman partying with cigars and bags of money, titled, “capitalism when we like it.” the right shows the same image, labeled, “corporatism when we don’t.”
a four panel comic. millenials and boomers are fighting with each other, each shouting, “:your generation ruined the economy.” a wealthy business owner watches, pleased. millenials and boomers stand in solidarity, each shouting, “capitalism ruined the economy!” the wealthy business owner is horrified.
an image titled ‘chug chug chug’ showing someone drinking an entire 5 gallon water bottle labeled, ‘respecting trans women juice.’
all of these are simple statements that present conclusions rooted in facts, but do not necessarily present the facts themselves.
propaganda presents the conclusion without the evidence. in plenty of cases, that’s because the evidence doesn’t exist. in the case of progressive propaganda, it’s because the evidence would literally be distracting from the point.
would the comic about people of different generations uniting to overthrow capitalist wealth inequality be made better, more accessible, or more effective by taking a fifteen minute detour to explain in perfect, nuanced detail all the ways capitalism created the current situation?
does saying, ‘trans rights are human rights’ work better if the speaker then tells their completely neutral and probably disinterested audience to settle in for an hour long lecture on the nuances of trans identity and history, and the necessity of human rights, and the ways human rights are encroached upon by misrepresenting restriction of rights as ‘safety’ for unrelated groups?
no. all of those discussions are great for people who are already interested in haing them. and they will do nothing but make progressive movements intimidating, dangerously purity driven, and inaccessible to anyone who doesn’t know where to start.
propaganda is a tool. it is a means by which you can pressure neutral parties into giving you an opening to actually make your arguments. it is a means by which you can force opposition parties into going on the defense rather than following their own agendas.
it’s a tool.
it does not hae deep moral weight.
but it is a tool that cruel, and indeed evil, people are often more willing, and as a result more skilled, at using.
and this is exactly why progressive people need to get better are using it.
Not to be rude but, we don’t do transformative justice just because it’s the moral thing to do. We do it because a society in which people who have done harm are held accountable and given tools so they don’t harm people in the future is better for those of us who have been harmed (and the most of us who have both harmed and been harmed) too. Prisons don’t make us safer, and neither does punishing the behavior we want to see when it happens. It’s a strategic choice we are making in order to make a more just society possible in the first place, not just a moral one.
