Yup. Just like racists and bigots get mad when you call them racist or bigoted, while decent people ask what they said that was offensive to avoid future misunderstandings.
It does my head in that these people moan racist, homophobic, antisemite etc have no meaning now. I see it a lot, and it’s just a whine cause they’ve been called out.
Is it reasonable to get mad from being called racist because you, as a shop employee, didn’t just let the customer take hundreds of dollars in cigarettes they demanded for free?
If someone calls you a rapist pedophile, are you going to get upset, or ask how you can better reduce your rapist pedophileness?
Would it be unreasonable to be upset if someone is specifically using that because they know in the local eco-niche, it could cost you your job and livelihood if people believe them?
What if you’re autistic and you’ve had a long life of people misrepresenting you intentionally or unintentionally because the double empathy problem is a thing? Like older kids beat the fuck out of you, and when they get in trouble they just claim you were being racist when you were just waiting in silence for the school library to open, and as you cry with eyes bruised and swollen shut, you are told you will be getting the same punishment as the older kids who just assaulted you, and also that the adults in the situation are okay believing you are a racist.
Etc.
I definitely agree with the larger sentiment of your statement, especially for the large scale picture of things, and existence of people like MAGA,
But the local context and social behaviours can definitely lead to situations that can make the insult and claim hard to internalize, when the claim has only been used against you with stark dishonesty.
Hell, got assaulted by a random drunk driver recently, and im glad they went for ‘pedo’ instead of ‘racist’ because it was much less believable to surrounding people in that context. Still doesn’t make me question what I could have done differently while being assaulted by a drunkard.
Nuance exists, and bad actors exist within every group, and frankly it shouldn’t be damning to find fewer insults more insulting, because of your own disdain for racists and abusers.
There are exceptions to every rule. Killing someone is bad. Killing someone about to detonate a bomb and destroy a city is heroic.
As a general rule, if someone tells me I said something racist, I’d want to know what it was and how it was perceived as racist to avoid making that mistake again. Have you ever tried to do that with an overt racist? Immediate defensive anger peacocking.
yes absolutely. few things are binary. it’s like people claiming pro-palestine protestors are antisemitic, or trying to take the valid examples of exceptions as an excuse for unrelated bigotry. it adds a lot of noise and makes it hard to navigate, so a lot of people running on low-dimensional heuristic maps of the situation will lash out and cause legitimate grievance between other people who can or can’t contextualize what happened and why. those who can’t repeat the cycle, and socialize it.
why russia has such an easy time causing division and self-segregating behaviour. also why anti-intellectualism and self-serving behaviour is bad. we are too hackable in contextually ‘noisy’ environments, and bad actors love using that to their advantage.
it takes a lot of energy and time to understand how many blindspots we have within our oversimplified prediction of the world, and diverse environments and experiences, both physical and cyberphysical, and how that leads other people to be making different assumptions about what the world actually looks like. this includes our projections and expectations of others, battling our innate predictive modelling and biases/blindspots.
the issue is when an audience is running on those heuristics and making important choices that affect people. being overconfident in your over-binary predictions can cause these damages that cycle a self fulfilling spiral of legitimate grievance. again, an easy fire to stoke.
Yup. Just like racists and bigots get mad when you call them racist or bigoted, while decent people ask what they said that was offensive to avoid future misunderstandings.
It does my head in that these people moan racist, homophobic, antisemite etc have no meaning now. I see it a lot, and it’s just a whine cause they’ve been called out.
Yeah people who don’t mind being called racists are “good racists”.
No one is completely without fault. If you think you are, you’re just unaware of your bias.
Is it reasonable to get mad from being called racist because you, as a shop employee, didn’t just let the customer take hundreds of dollars in cigarettes they demanded for free?
If someone calls you a rapist pedophile, are you going to get upset, or ask how you can better reduce your rapist pedophileness?
Would it be unreasonable to be upset if someone is specifically using that because they know in the local eco-niche, it could cost you your job and livelihood if people believe them?
What if you’re autistic and you’ve had a long life of people misrepresenting you intentionally or unintentionally because the double empathy problem is a thing? Like older kids beat the fuck out of you, and when they get in trouble they just claim you were being racist when you were just waiting in silence for the school library to open, and as you cry with eyes bruised and swollen shut, you are told you will be getting the same punishment as the older kids who just assaulted you, and also that the adults in the situation are okay believing you are a racist. Etc.
I definitely agree with the larger sentiment of your statement, especially for the large scale picture of things, and existence of people like MAGA, But the local context and social behaviours can definitely lead to situations that can make the insult and claim hard to internalize, when the claim has only been used against you with stark dishonesty.
Hell, got assaulted by a random drunk driver recently, and im glad they went for ‘pedo’ instead of ‘racist’ because it was much less believable to surrounding people in that context. Still doesn’t make me question what I could have done differently while being assaulted by a drunkard. Nuance exists, and bad actors exist within every group, and frankly it shouldn’t be damning to find fewer insults more insulting, because of your own disdain for racists and abusers.
There are exceptions to every rule. Killing someone is bad. Killing someone about to detonate a bomb and destroy a city is heroic.
As a general rule, if someone tells me I said something racist, I’d want to know what it was and how it was perceived as racist to avoid making that mistake again. Have you ever tried to do that with an overt racist? Immediate defensive anger peacocking.
yes absolutely. few things are binary. it’s like people claiming pro-palestine protestors are antisemitic, or trying to take the valid examples of exceptions as an excuse for unrelated bigotry. it adds a lot of noise and makes it hard to navigate, so a lot of people running on low-dimensional heuristic maps of the situation will lash out and cause legitimate grievance between other people who can or can’t contextualize what happened and why. those who can’t repeat the cycle, and socialize it.
why russia has such an easy time causing division and self-segregating behaviour. also why anti-intellectualism and self-serving behaviour is bad. we are too hackable in contextually ‘noisy’ environments, and bad actors love using that to their advantage.
it takes a lot of energy and time to understand how many blindspots we have within our oversimplified prediction of the world, and diverse environments and experiences, both physical and cyberphysical, and how that leads other people to be making different assumptions about what the world actually looks like. this includes our projections and expectations of others, battling our innate predictive modelling and biases/blindspots.
the issue is when an audience is running on those heuristics and making important choices that affect people. being overconfident in your over-binary predictions can cause these damages that cycle a self fulfilling spiral of legitimate grievance. again, an easy fire to stoke.
I agree. Nothing about human nature is truly binary. The universe is on a spectrum.