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There is a common criticism of people (okay, of Tumblr denizens) for being special snowflakes. They make up an absurd number of labels! Why would you want to identify as a requiessexual bipoetisexual squidgender moongender aroflux lesbian when you could identify as, well, normal?
But, in fact, as absurd as the subsubsubsubsubclassifications get sometimes, Tumblr’s attitude towards sexual orientations and genders is actually good.
Because the thing is… when you identify as a requiessexual bipoetisexual squidgender moongender aroflux lesbian, what you are saying is “I’m sexually attracted to fictional characters of all genders, but I’m only attracted to women in real life; I am too sad and crazy to actually be interested in sex ever; sometimes I’m squicked out by the idea of falling in love with someone, but sometimes I have crushes; my gender feels like it waxes and wanes between a nonbinary gender and genderlessness, kind of like the moon, but also when I think about it too much it runs away in a squirt of ink, kind of like a squid.”
You are acknowledging that these are experiences that may fall within the continuum of normal experiences (at least of normal lesbian/nonbinary experiences), but you want language to talk about your specific experiences. You want to draw out the distinctions between people who are attracted to fictional characters of their nonpreferred gender and people who aren’t, people who are grossed out by the idea of romantic attraction and people who aren’t, people whose crazy makes them asexual or hypersexual or doesn’t affect them at all.
In short: special snowflakeism is the opposite of typical mind fallacy.
And of course it would be very destructive if everyone had to identify somewhere on the requiessexual spectrum. (What if some of us are so sad and crazy that we HAVE to fuck, huh?) But Tumblr does not seem to have done this, in part because if you’re confused about what the alloromantic/aromantic spectrum even means you can invent your own word and cheerfully identify as wtfromantic.
If we think the typical mind fallacy is a fallacy– if we believe that universal human experiences are not shared by everyone– then we should embrace Tumblr’s habit of precise language and fine distinctions. Perhaps we do not wish to apply it to our sex lives; perhaps we want to apply it to productivity, or nonsexual social roles, or aptitudes, and leave sex to the “eh, I guess I’m kind of normal” category. But it is strange and destructive to be against people wanting to understand themselves better.
Thing of Things 
The obvious objection is that someone who identifies as “requiessexual bipoetisexual squidgender moongender aroflux lesbian” isn’t seriously trying to describe the specifics of their sexuality and instead is just signaling membership in Tumblr tribe. It’s also seen as a grab for status – describing oneself in such detail is seen as a claim that the reader ought to remember all of those details, when it’s usually irrelevant. If you replace the symbol with the substance, the common response to “my gender waxes and wanes between non-binary and genderless, kind of like the moon” is “I don’t care”.
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But the terms are usually used either in people’s blog sidebars or conversations about gender. Reading someone’s blog sidebar and then getting upset when it contains words that describe them in great detail is like going into a sushi restaurant and being like “WHY IS THERE SO MUCH RAW FISH, RAW FISH IS GROSS.”
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Except that people aren’t really upset by it. Nobody has cried themselves to sleep over an overly precise Tumblr bio. Rather, people tend to think it’s funny or worthy of mockery, or evidence of trying too hard to make yourself look interesting; an understandable response to a Tumblr bio that gives too much information or information that most people would not consider relevant or information that most people would consider private or embarassing.
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Making fun of a sushi restaurant for having raw fish is also silly.
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I’m in favor of special snowflakism up to the point that it exceeds the bounds of public language. Contra blacktrance, I think “when I think about [gender] too much [my gender identity] runs away in a squirt of ink” is interesting, I just don’t think putting the word “squidgender” in a sidebar communicates it.
Absent your paragraph of explanation, squidgender doesn’t seem to mean anything: it’s not in wiktionary, it doesn’t have an ngram, and a Googling for it results in adorable creations of a Deviant Art person called “squidgender”, rather than any helpful explanation of how squidgendered people experience life.
Maybe squidgender is just a bad example, but I do think that some snowflakes are so special they need to offer definitions if they are to successfully express their specialness.
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I think it’s an issue of generalizations. People often make broad assumptions about groups based on the actions of a few members of those groups. True, most people keep their 2 paragraph sexuality/gender descriptor consigned to their sidebar. However, there’s a vocal subgroup that inserts it into as many conversations as they can, often with the goal of making others in that conversation responsible for acknowledging it. This is where the backlash comes from.
I think most (I won’t say all) people don’t mind if someone is squidgender. Most people don’t mind if they’re open about being squidgender. What they do mind is being held responsible for remembering all the squidgender pronouns and squidgender triggers, alongside the umpteen other ___gender/___sexual pronouns and triggers, and getting berated/shamed/insulted any and every time they forget.
There aren’t a lot who do that, but there are enough that it makes people wary of interacting with anyone who thinks the first thing you need to know about them is an incredibly long gender/sexual preference description that likely has little to no bearing on the actual topic of conversation.
I think the kink community is probably a good model for how most of these preferences/orientations should be handled. Most people in kink tend to go with the assumption that nobody needs to or wants to know about the fact that you need [insert obscure kink here] in order to get satisfaction. You talk about it with current/potential partners and maybe other people in the kink scene, usually in kink specific spaces, and that’s about it. It’s not really pertinent for people following your Dr Who fanfic blog.
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Politics aside, it seems more like making fun of a 40 page sushi restaurant menu that goes into excessive detail about the ingredients and preparation methods for each dish.
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@Royal Night Guard: And (in some cases) the restaurant has a sign on the door saying “don’t you dare come in here and try to order something unless you’ve read the entire menu.”
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And only lists dishes in binomial nomenclature, just so they can appear knowledgeable and interesting by explaining when when their patrons inevitably have to ask.
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“But the terms are usually used either in people’s blog sidebars or conversations about gender. Reading someone’s blog sidebar and then getting upset when it contains words that describe them in great detail is like going into a sushi restaurant and being like “WHY IS THERE SO MUCH RAW FISH, RAW FISH IS GROSS.””
This seems sorta like the general debate over Bradford’s challenge. My experience is that going into a blog and reading the labels you laid out above doesn’t actually tell me any of what you went on to describe. All I see is a big neon sign flashing TUMBLR SOCIAL JUSTICE SPACE AHEAD. It’s a big, unmistakable tribal signal, like decorating the outside of your house with giant crosses and bible verses and Jesus Fish. If you saw a house decorated that way, would you stop and look up the individual verses and examine the positioning of the Crosses and try to tease out a clearer understanding of the exact theological position the person is trying to associate themselves with, or do you round them to “the sort of person who decorates the outside of their house with giant crosses, bible verses, and jesus fish”, shudder, and move on?
“Defines themselves with an elaborate system of social-justice-tinged labels” is a much stronger signal than the labels themselves, separately or in aggregate.
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People tend to overestimate how much other people are thinking about them. I am unconvinced that Tumblr people are thinking up ways to make others feel unwelcome by using terms that they don’t understand. My default hypothesis is that Tumblr people are not thinking about those people at all when they use those terms.
I think it’s less analogous to putting everything in binomial nomenclature (something that isn’t standard in sushi restaurants) and more analogous to putting the names in Japanese and not putting the English translation in parentheses (something that is fairly common in sushi restaurants as well other ethnic food restaurants). Both of these assume that most of their customers are going to be fairly knowledgeable about the food, and in fact doing this helps the restaurant project an image that they know what they’re doing, as well. It helps a fancy or traditional Italian restaurant distinguish itself from the Olive Garden.
Do people who aren’t really familiar with Japanese or Italian food find this offputting or unwelcoming? Yes, they often do. It shows that their restaurant is oriented around a certain type of customer and they’re not it. Are they deliberately trying to keep that type of customer out? Sometimes, though at least as often it’s just that they’re catering to a particular type of customer–they know their clientele–and they’re not particularly interested in thinking about that customer and setting things up around their preferences. I think most of the time, Tumblr people are writing for a particular audience, and it’s hardly unique to Tumblr people to choose as their particular audience, “people who share a lot of things in common with me”. I don’t see anything wrong with writing for a particular audience, any more than setting out to attract a particular type of clientele, and making that clientele “people who really like sushi” rather than “tourists from a place with not many sushi restaurants”.
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“they’re not particularly interested in thinking about that customer and setting things up around their preferences.” should be “the other customers”
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@osberend
That’s getting into the politics I was trying to put aside. Even if there is no sign, ‘special snowflake’ labels may sometimes simply violate the rules of cooperative communication to be relevant and to be as informative as required for the purpose of the exchange but not more informative than that.
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They may also violate the rule of cooperative communication to be clear.
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I don’t think the reason people are against special snowflakism is that people are necessarily misdescribing how they perceive their sexual orientations.
The argument is that they’re incorrectly conflating different categories of things. If I say somebody is into boardgames and then they respond with “actually I’m into german games from the 1980s to 1990s which are highly strategic and moderately luck based as well as some ameri-trash from the early 2000s, but not really the late 2000s ad only the stuff which is high fantasy with a tolkienesque, rather than silly manner or dystopic in a hard sci-fiy way, so it’s more accurate to call me a pseudo-late twentieth century strategic euro non-pro-perfect information weakly pro-tolkien-fantasy ameritrassh and also a connosieur with ameri-sci-fi-dystraphoric games” people are very much going to roll their eyes. They aren’t rolling their eyes because you have preferences or that these preferences aren’t the norm. They’re rolling their eyes because the basic answer to the question of are you a boardgame geeks is “yes” not “here is a detailed description of what I’m into”.
Similarly if somebody has a particular combination of sexual interest and fetishes or what have you that’s great, congratulations to them for trying to figure it out, it’s important to figure out one’s sexuality (at least usually) but in general if somebody is asking about somebodies sexual orientation this is not the information they’re trying to gleam.
The other annoying which is especially true for sexual orientations to me is that this mis-conflation or Orientation and preference set/needs. Sexual orientations as currently modeled, are construed as fairly immutable and god-given. A large part of the credence about why it’s more unethical to dislike gay people vs people with tattoos is that gay people didn’t really have a choice. (You’re still being a dick to people with tattoos but I think it’s usually less bad). In reality sexual orientations are somewhat socially constructed somewhat mutable for some people and way more fucking complicated then the map we’ve drawn. But the best thing to do is to acknowledge that and try and separate the fascinating complications from the big and somewhat incorrect generalities rather than to just try and build a more and more structured construct based on a somewhat flaky approximation of immutability and god-givenness. If somebody is a women, interested in women and also primarily into slightly androgynous very tall women with blue hair and figured that out that’s great, but I think it’s incorrect and moderately damaging to treat the being into very tall people with blue hair the same way we treat being into women.
This let’s us avoid calling sexual orientations problematic which is very linked to heternormativity and bad social pressure and still analyze that hey maybe substantial sexual preference for taller men has a problematic component and we should analyze it.
TLDR, yay people figuring out their sexual preferences, but could we please stop making category errors and conflating sexual preferences with sexual orientations
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I agree. It’s natural for young people to try to define themselves, but it’s also egocentric. You should try to use words others understand, rather than forcing them to google just to figure out a basic thing like your gender or sexual orientation. Only people you are seriously dating should be burdened with the need to remember the nuances of your sexual practices or gender beliefs.
Even more so, people should be spending most of their time and energy on doing some useful work in the world, rather than navel-gazing. Listing your top ten favorite bands or making up exactly the right word for your gender philosophy or political beliefs may give an illusory sense of accomplishment, but it’s not real achievement.
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I am sure you have never used the word “utilitarian.”
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I hate everyone who complains about “special snowflakes”. I suppose they might be reacting against a history of dealing with utility monsters or narcissists, but I see them as unspecial snowflakes and completely average emotional abusers.
They are so fragile they can’t deal with other people’s pain, so they congratulate themselves on how tough they are.
*****
Ok, let’s switch to relatively civilized mode. I’m not empathic with everyone about everything, and I react very badly to anything that looks like a demand that I care a great deal more than I want to.
Still, at least I stop short of telling people that they should ignore their own lives.
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A social justice analogy I’ve seen, Many Social justice people will get upset if somebody says I’m Irish rather than white in response to a question about the race. Saying they have irish heritage is basically giving more information but still seems to upset people due to gatekeeping concerns and do to the fact that, in most discussions about race, Irish people are functionally white.
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Similarly, I’ve found most people don’t like it when someone claims to be “1/64 Cherokee” or something along those lines. It is being more specific, but people see it as appropriative or just probably made up.
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Is this serendipitous or what? I’ve just been thinking (on foot of a radio interview with Rhiannon Giddens about the banjo) about “Are the Irish white?”
Now, racially, of course we are. But if we’re talking “race as a social construct”, then at times and in places, the Irish have not been white. This makes race – or rather, racism – a much more fluid concept. If SJ considers you can’t be racist to or about white people, this is nonsense; of course you can (see the Italians and Spanish etc. who were considered ‘not white’ in similar fashion).
I prefer to answer such questions with “I’m Caucasian (just like those people from North Africa and those people from Central Asia)” 🙂
Regarding “special snowflakeism”, a lot of these people are very young. And when you’re young, you like certainty and definition and parsing things down to the last degree, because if you find (e.g. for me) yes, I’m asexual but I don’t fit into that category quite on all the box-ticks, then it’s not good enough to go “Eh, categories are blurry, close enough for folk music”.
You HAVE to define and sub-define because how else will you know who are the Good Guys and who are the Bad Guys that we can all be sure who to support and who to fight?
When you’re young, you’re still discovering yourself and trying to define who and what you are in distinction from being X member of family, Y attending this school, etc. So a list of “This, this, this and this” is a way of making yourself a separate entity, not letting your identity (which is still fragile and in the process of being formed) be subsumed into a mass of “this is the norm”.
And to give them their due, the Tumblr Special Snowflakes gave me a whole vocabulary with which to discuss my discovery of orientation – the difference between asexual and aromantic, for instance (I’m definitely aro, fall somewhere around the grey/demi-sexual side of ace). It gave me the concepts which I had never had before, other than “Well, if I’m not interested in sex and romance, there must be something wrong with me, because society is all about shoving people into couples – and now they’re giving people the freedom to be in same-gender as well as opposite-gender couples, but not wanting to be half of a couple at all is weird and wrong and abnormal and means I’ll probably turn out to stab blonde women in the shower”.
So I may not agree with the whole shouting match, but I have to be grateful to them for that: what I am is A Thing, and not A Wrong Thing, and not broken, unnatural, weird, etc.
tl;dr – when I was young(er), I was a pissy little judgemental bitch. I’m still pissy, bitchy and judgemental now I’m older, but I’ve learned when to shrug my shoulders and keep my trap shut instead of getting into rows (well, some of the time, at least).
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People who refer to themselves as Caucasian by choice are usually either white and American or inhabitants of the Caucasus region. It would be very confusing to turn up in West or Central Asia (or a lot of Europe for that matter) and tell them that most of them are Caucasian. They would mostly disagree.
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or inhabitants of the Caucasus region.
Almost certainly not. There’s far too much ethnic variation packed into such a small area, and people care about their differences more than their similarities. Russians may call them Caucasians (or more often “individuals of Caucasian nationality”). Ironically from a Western perspective, Russians also call people from the Caucasus “black” (chernye) in reference to their typical hair and eye color, distinct from people of African descent, who are still known as “negro” in Russian.
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I have in laws who use Caucasian as a secondary identity, rather like the use of Scandinavian as secondary by people who would still be annoyed if their primary ethnicity of Danish was confused with Swedish.
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There’s a pretty big difference between how you feel right now, and what you are. And… getting that wrong, turning the transient into an identity issue that you constantly curate and adjust without realizing what you’re doing because you aren’t very good at your own emotions, is one of the most cringe inducing aspects of teenager-dom.
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I think this reply catches a lot of what I wanted to say more succinctly.
Basically, I’d have no problem with the _description_ but I’m a bit weirded out by turning it into a set of _labels_.
I suspect this partly has to do with a deep difference in how people perceive labels. I know Ozy has commented in the past that they find descriptors and labels really comforting. (I’m not sure “comforting” is the right word, but they’ve expressed very positive thoughts about having labels for themself). On the other hand, I tend to be more comfortable with fewer labels. I’m happy to talk about what I do, or what I like, or what I believe, but what I am is “awesome” and I’d mostly rather leave it there.
(That’s not to say I don’t accept labels when they exist and fit; arguing that I’m a person who has light skin and lives in America, rather than a white American, would be silly. And I definitely identify as male, although half the fun of that is to watch people’s reactions when I start talking about clothes and makeup).
Really, I want to reference the proverb about keeping your identity small. There’s one group of people who like keeping their identity small, and another group who like keeping it big, and I suspect that the first group is always confused and a little off-put by the second.
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It’s worth mentioning that about half of these terms come from ace/aro discourse, and the other half from non-binary discourse. In both cases, the communities are rising up against a consensus that they don’t exist, and don’t deserve a term. They had to invent terms for themselves. Some of those terms have been wildly successful in creating communities and connections. So why not try inventing more? They can’t all be winners, but you never know until you throw a bunch of words at the wall until some stick.
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I find that when I attach labels to myself I sometimes find myself unconsciously acting more like the archetypical example of that label. This is annoying for me because I want to do the things I want to do, not the things that people in my category are supposed to want to do. So I try to avoid labeling myself.
I am not sure if sticking a ton of special labels on yourself would help fight this tendency, or make it worse. On the one hand, more labels gives you more archetypical examples to act like. On the other hand, more labels means you can fight the temptation to conform to one label by realizing that it makes you conform less to a different label
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it depends. I mean, there’s the Kinsey Scale (if you believe that thing is any actual use) for mainstream, majority heterosexual/homosexual orientations. Instead of freaking out over “Oh dear God, I think [male person] is hot and I’m male, this means I’m gay!” (or “Oh yay, this means I’m gay!”, depending on how you react), what you can say is “Nah, what this means is I’m a 1 or 2 on the scale; mainly straight but can find some men sexually attractive”.
So that kind of ‘labelling’ can be helpful. I also don’t think you need to commit yourself to everything; there’s no “Well, if I’m straight and a man I should immediately grow a bushy beard, take up alligator-wrasslin’, talk exclusively to other manly men about sports and hunting, and never put on a load of laundry in my life – that’s what my mother and my wife are for” compulsory List of Acceptable Attributes.
But that’s part of being young; you do think you have to fall into line with every whole thing or else you’re doing it wrong, and we condition our youth (from school onwards) that if they Do It Wrong they are terrible failures who won’t get into a good college, so they won’t get a good job, and will end up as winos and druggies sleeping rough.
Labels can be helpful – ever try sorting out a shelf of chemicals in a lab without them? “Hmmm – is this clear, viscous acid hydrochloric or sulphuric? Should I stick my finger in and test?” 🙂
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Instead of freaking out over “Oh dear God, I think [male person] is hot and I’m male, this means I’m gay!” (or “Oh yay, this means I’m gay!”, depending on how you react), what you can say is “Nah, what this means is I’m a 1 or 2 on the scale; mainly straight but can find some men sexually attractive”.
Or you could just say “I am attracted to vast numbers of of women, and this one dude—’straight’ is a perfectly reasonable approximation for all purposes other than ‘should I try to determine whether this one dude is also attracted to me, and pursue a relationship and/or hot sex if so,’ for which labels are irrelevant, unless he cares intensely about them, in which case he’s a doucheboat, and I shouldn’t pursue a relationship with him regardless of what the ‘proper term’ for my orientation is.”
But that’s part of being young; you do think you have to fall into line with every whole thing or else you’re doing it wrong,
Really? This does not sound like my recollection of my own teenage years—it’s possible I’m subconsciously editing my memories to accord with how I think about things now[1], but I really don’t think so.
“Hmmm – is this clear, viscous acid hydrochloric or sulphuric? Should I stick my finger in and test?”
Obviously not—all you’ll get from that is that it causes chemical burns, and while sulfuric acid will cause worse burns at the same concentration, you’ll probably be too distracted to make an unbiased assessment. Clearly, you should mix it with nitric acid, and see if the mixture can disolve gold. :p
[1] Apparently research shows (based on having people keep diaries but not re-read them) that people do this to a shocking extent.
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Minor nitpick: the typical mind fallacy is a fallacy, yes, but that does not imply the inversion is correct; reversed stupidity is not intelligence. It could be the case that the inversion to some degree is correct (I tend to use it as a heuristic…) but it seems to me that one would expect some limit to human diversity (though the fact that people actually use these words is evidence that we haven’t reached that limit yet).
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Surely no two people are absolutely physically and psychologically identical in all respects relevant to sex, gender, and romance, so the only hard limit would be one label for each of the 7 billion or so people on the planet.
This system could achieve extreme precision and have no outliers. The problem is it would also be ridiculous and impractical for obvious reasons.
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Of course, but where you place the limit in the coarseness of labels surely depends on the context. In particular, on tumblr blogs where people discuss their esoteric preferences it seems to make sense to use more esoteric terms to describe ones preferences.
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I agree that could be the case. A cooperative communicator makes their contributions clear and as informative as necessary for the purpose of the exchange but no more informative than that.
In the context of those tumblr blogs, ‘special snowflake’ labels may be reasonably clear and not more informative than the community and discussions there requires.
I would say that if someone enters such a community and complains about the labels, they are in the wrong. And if someone from such a community uses the labels in a more normal, everyday social context, they are in the wrong too (especially if they have the expectation that others should not take issue with this).
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I actually think my attitude on these issues is explained pretty well in “social justice” terms. Though I define things differently. My gut feeling is there are is an oppressed group and an oppressor group. Someone is oppressed if they are “unusual” in anyway that is important to them and “society” does not really accept. So furries, non-binary people, trans individuals, autistic people etc. The oppressor class is anyone who is mean to “weird” people (some slack is given, no one is mono-nice). So much of society is in the oppressor class. Notably there are some people int he “neutral” category.
Importantly a “weird” person who is mean to other “wierd” people gets thrown right in with the rest of the opressor class. So feminists hating on GNC men, wizard chan style people hating on women are both well into the oppressor camp (there is really a spectrum here). However if someone is a “weird person who is not mean to other people” I almost certainly side with them. So I personally find it deeply upsetting to hear any criticism of people dress choices, tumblr style genders, etc. Even “humor” that pokes fun at people’s unusual traits is really grating to me. Of course attacking tumblr people for hypocrisy is fine!
This is just an explanation of how I actually feel. Not saying its the correct way to feel!
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“You are acknowledging that these are experiences that may fall within the continuum of normal experiences (at least of normal lesbian/nonbinary experiences), but you want language to talk about your specific experiences. ”
We have language like that; in fact, you just managed to describe this hypothetical Tumblrite perfectly without using any of the words that are supposedly so essential.
“But it is strange and destructive to be against people wanting to understand themselves better.”
Is it really clear that the average voidgender 15 year old Tumblrite’s self-understanding is helped at all by picking some cool-sounding words off a list? I would not agree. To my mind, this kind of self-understanding is barely any greater than what is gleaned from a tabloid horoscope or a “What Sherlock Character Are You?” test, both of which purport to offer self-knowledge, but are ultimately empty of anything more than the shallowest descriptive power. If someone says that self-defining as an Aquarius helps them achieve a better understanding of themselves, are we supposed to take them seriously?
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If someone says that self-defining as an Aquarius helps them achieve a better understanding of themselves, are we supposed to take them seriously?
YES.
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In what sense do you mean this?
Surely, you aren’t suggesting that astrology is valid ‘for them’; astrology plainly lacks predictive power, and therefore is invalid as a matter of fact. Similarly, the ‘Aquarius’ description is meant to apply to a large number of people selected at random, and is therefore as empty as possible while giving the appearance of specificity.
I suppose that we can take it as seriously as we take any Rorschach test- but it’s not as if the blot itself is meaningful. We can be happy that the person has achieved self-understanding, without pretending that their information source was external.
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If someone says “identifying as an Aquarius helps me understand myself better”, I will predict that they are more likely to be an unconventional freethinker who marches to the beat of their own drummer, and less likely to be a stable, hardworking, ambitious Capricorn or a considerate, sensitive, perceptive Pisces. Star signs don’t give literally zero information.
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“If someone says “identifying as an Aquarius helps me understand myself better”, I will predict that they are more likely to be an unconventional freethinker who marches to the beat of their own drummer”
Merely being born in February doesn’t affect your personality.
“Star signs don’t give literally zero information.”
The only information that star signs convey is that you consider the qualities that your star sign is arbitrarily associated with to be appealing or attractive and want others to associate you with them. But star signs are deliberately designed to only encompass appealing, attractive virtues like creativity or diligence, because it makes them more appealing as memes. So the information content is extremely low.
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Merely being born in February doesn’t affect your personality
When You Are Born Matters
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Yes, but if a person goes “hmm, eccentric and freethinking, that sounds like me” (much less “wow! It got me exactly right! This is a really helpful tool for understanding my personality!”), I am probably going to assume they are, in fact, eccentric and freethinking. People who did not have a self-image as eccentric and freethinking would probably go “well, this is nonsense.” I do predict that people who are way into astrology are probably closer to the personality star signs predict they have than people who aren’t.
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If they’re fifteen and struggling with “Why do I like X when everyone is telling me I should like Y” (and I’m not talking about sexual choices here; this can be anything from what subject you want to do for your Leaving Certificate to sports to clothes to vegetables), then HELL YES you take them seriously if they tell you the reason they like dark blue and salads is because they’re Aquarius.
They’ll grow out of it as they get older: Ní thagann ciall riomh aois! (Sense does not come before age) and mocking the young for being young is not behaviour befitting someone who claims to be an adult. Rebuking foolish behaviour that is wilful and harmful is fine; making fun of someone’s interests, even if they’re silly, is not.
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If they’re fifteen and struggling with “Why do I like X when everyone is telling me I should like Y”
Since when is “because I do, and fuck you” not an adequate 15-year-old (or older, for that matter) answer to this question?
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@Osberend: since most 15 year olds would rather look rational and considerate than they would obstinate and aggressive.
The kind of certainty that breeds your response isn’t unheard of in that age range, but mostly it’s a morass of developing identity and attempting to fit in.
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In my mind this is a matter of denotation v.s connotation. A person who calls themselves a “requiessexual bipoetisexual squidgender moongender aroflux lesbian” may very well be trying to describe themselves more accurately. At the same time though sexuality based labels are heavily associated with being oppressed. So when people label themselves with a label that sounds suspiciously similar to homosexual/bisexual. As if to seeming imply they have it just as hard as the homeless gay kid who was kicked out of their parents house. While being barely different from your typical heterosexual. It’s no surprise that people might be annoyed by this.
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What if I say I’m gay? Am I implying that I have as hard as the homeless gay kid?
I think this connotative connection between sexuality-based labels and oppression is harmful. Maybe we should fight it! We could all adopt sexuality-based labels that have nothing to do with oppression at all, and eventually people will get it.
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Good point, megaemolga. Though, to be honest, I’m hesitant to believe it’s always a matter of wanting to describe themselves more accurately in a way that the listener will actually understand.
Take sapiosexual – attracted to intelligence. Most people aren’t familiar with the word. So, if you say “I find intelligence sexy”, your listener will probably understand you. If you say “I identify as sapiosexual,” your listener will probably not understand you.
Deliberately using words other people are not familiar with, to explain concepts you can easily use common words for, is nothing but a power grab. It makes you look more intelligent and makes them feel stupid for not knowing the word, forcing them to either pretend to understand or ask you what it means – putting you in a position of authority (power).
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@Anon – “Deliberately using words other people are not familiar with, to explain concepts you can easily use common words for, is nothing but a power grab.”
…Even more so when it goes along with a demand that others follow your personal and highly eccentric rules of etiquette.
It seems to me that societies have systems of etiquette that everyone picks up to a greater or lesser extent. “Socially awkward” means you have a poor grasp on the rules, but you still have SOME grasp, even if it’s only the understanding that other people seem to fit in and you don’t. Tumblr doesn’t just ditch the normal etiquette system, it rejects the very idea of a standardized etiquette. We still need to be polite to each other, but now instead of all trying to conform to one rule, everyone gets to decide what the rules are for themselves. The result is chaos, discord, strife, which matches the reputation tumblr has built for itself.
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My principle is that if it costs you nothing (or very little) to show respect to another person, you ought to.
It costs nothing to not be a dick about the self identification of people on twitter.
Therefore you ought to.
—Myca
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Between the typical mind fallacy and things that are specific to an individual, there have to be thoughts and experiences common to smaller groups. It is possible that collectively people on Tumblr could create or uncover an understanding of sexuality that is meaningful and helpful to many other people in understanding themselves. But perhaps it is harder to do that if it is all about the individual and condensed down into a series of labels. I can’t really know without a person who uses multiple labels saying what has happened to them as a consequence of using them.
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I don’t have a problem with the contents of the list per se, but there is definitely a reflexive eye-roll when I see it placed front and center. What I’m responding to is (my perception) that the identity index is being used for signalling.
In particular, I feel like people often use these identities to build a social presence for themselves, or otherwise try to be interesting and present a compelling face to the world- this instead of taking meaningful actions or having original ideas. When I complain about special snowflake-ism, I’m referring to the same vacuous absurdity as those people who are constantly posting prefabricated images on social media that say things like “Post this image if you’re PROUD of being a GRANDMA”, or mass-produced Hallmark cards with purportedly sincere messages. Basically, they’re granfalloons: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Granfalloon
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I love the granfalloon concept and hadn’t seen it before, but surely Hallmark card messages and proud to be a grandma/sister etc are sincere expressions of love from the inarticulate? I’m pretty sure my sister puts this stuff up on FB because she loves me and isn’t John Keats, not because she wants to participate in a granfalloon with all other people who are sisters.
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I think that my (and many others’) instinctive contempt for Hallmark-ism lies in the (at least, perceived) ostentatious presentation of (a particular brand of) genericness as “special.” If one is inarticulate, and can’t express their love uniquely, they should simply say “I love you” to the person they love, not share some idiotic Facebook meme with all the world.
I think this cuts to the heart of a broader aspect of repulsion at special snowflakism: Not everyone is special[1], and that’s okay. But trying really hard to be special when you’re not is . . . not morally wrong, necessarily (although some manifestations of it are), but just pathetic.
[1] In a global sense. One hopes to be special to someone, but that can easily be a product of particularism.
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I wouldn’t even say that contempt is at the heart of it for me; I’d go with the more general ‘aversion’. I am surprisingly uncomfortable in any situation where I am expected to send a prefabricated card (I feel much better if I can at least add a few personal notes of my own), read one, or express gratitude for receiving one.
The patterns of behavior under the ‘special snowflake’ umbrella trigger a very similar instinctive reaction. I think it’s basically the sense that a very personal and individual thing is being mediated by social conglomerates. “My relationship to you has corporate sponsorship, therefore it’s real” or “my sexual identity has four epicycles defined by social justice bloggers, therefore I am understood.”
But I do have to admit that the aversion comes first, and this is at best a post-hoc explanation. I just recognize the similarities and theorize about what’s going on in my head.
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[Note, some of this may not perfectly apply to others in this thread. But honestly, I bet it kinda does. I’ve been reading some of you for a while, and I think this stuff is on target. Take it for what it is worth.]
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My g/f sends those silly Facebook things to me all the time. Which, it’s actually sweet. She sees the thing, she thinks to herself, “Yeah, I feel that way about veronica,” and then she sends it on.
Awwwwwww!
Look, not everyone is as verbally adept as some of us here. She’s smart enough, mostly at music — she plays guitar for a sloppy, sleazy punk band. She’s pretty good. But words aren’t really her thing.
She does tell me she loves me with her words, but she also tells me she loves me by adopting trite cultural memes and sending them to me. It’s really nice. It makes my heart all glow-ey.
Look, you all are entitled to your own opinions on this stuff. Likewise, in your own relationships you get to set your own boundaries. If you don’t want to date someone who sends that stuff, then don’t. Easy peasy.
But when you degrade and dismiss these things, you are talking about actual people with heartfelt affections. You’re looking disdainfully at sweetness and love.
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I admire intelligence. Which look, I’m pretty smart and that has earned me a high status social position. I would not give up my smarts for anything. After all, I depend on them for my living, and I depend on my living for everything. (Being a tranny with money and status is worlds apart from being a tranny without.) But I think that smart people often overvalue smarts, at least in a social framework, and then they become confused that the world does not fall at their feet. They are befuddled when the “stupid” get all the rewards.
And so they adopt tedious social theories, about status and signaling, as if they can play anthropologist toward their fellow humans, and how their social weakness is everyone else’s fault. What they do not realize is they lack warmth and understanding. People want a kind of intimacy and acceptance that smart, judgmental people do not give.
Look, I have problems with this myself. For me, giving warmth and acceptance is a learned skill, and there are people in my life who have paid a price for my learning. I still struggle with it. But I accept that I need it, and I do not resent this fact. OF COURSE people want warmth and understanding.
I understand that there are levels of neuro-diversity where this becomes nearly impossible. I’m neuro-diverse, but clearly I was “not so bad.” I was able to figure it out. But it took time. For those who cannot, I don’t know what to say. Good luck. There are other ways to love. I hope you find them.
But when such people are disdainful toward *how other people love* — well, here is where we hit a boundary. I’ll say this: your contempt with be met with equal contempt in reverse. Choose.
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For a while there, I had what what I call “the op ed writer in my head”– the person who can always find something to despise. In various ways, it played into a habit of self-hatred– not only was there a possibility that there was something wrong with everything I did and everything I liked, but obviously I wasn’t despising enough things.
Eventually, I realized that “see people doing something (or state that a trend exists), claim there’s something wrong with it and them” was a very easy stance. I became less vulnerable when I started imagining someone not very bright and faced with a deadline. They’re desperate for a topic, what can they do? And the answer is… complain about other people getting things wrong.
I’ve since also come to the conclusion that anything people do, any sign of initiative, will get attacked. Low status people get attacked more, but creativity from rich people isn’t reliably welcome either.
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@Toggle — So basically you are *smug*, with your own over-inflated sense of superiority. These are not attractive traits.
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@VeronicaD – “So basically you are *smug*, with your own over-inflated sense of superiority. These are not attractive traits.”
Where does the “smug” idea come from? how does that apply to what he’s saying? He’s smug because he thinks a particular action that some people take is stupid and took the time to explain why? Are you smug for thinking he’s smug? Or by sticking to the insult and leaving off the explanation, are you hoping to establish your relative moral superiority as merely rude? I’d say that’s not an attractive trait either, but what does attractiveness have to do with anything?
Granfalloon seems like a useful concept, but I’m not sure it’s quite on the mark. “Hoosier” may be an essentially meaningless label, but Tumblrite predicts behavior, outlook, customs, etc. Whether those predictions are accurate is a separate question, but the idea is someone who has built a set of highly non-standard rules into their communication, many of which may be poorly defined and enforced or even self-contradictory, and has preemptively asserted that these rules must be followed by everyone around them. That’s *aggressive* stupidity, not just the regular type.
You might argue that the aggressively stupid people are a minority. That’s very unfortunate for those who want to explore their identity tags in peace, but unfortunately it’s not as simple as yelling “no true scottsman!” and calling it a day.
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*Smugness* is when one is quite sure of their own superiority, but in this case, frankly I doubt it. There is a *meanness* to his comment, which to me suggests resentment and personal inadequacy.
Bullies are usually weaklings, at least when viewed in the big picture. People who are hostile to the “stupid” are seldom particularly smart. And round and round it goes.
I on the other hand am charming and kind.
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Veronica, I’m not sure if this is unusually deadpan irony, but you frequently do not come across as either charming and kind, in large part because you post as above; in an aggressive and judgmental style.
I won’t make claim as to whether you actually are charming or kind outside this particular thread of discussion, because I recognize that I’m not seeing a complete picture of you, and it would be foolish to assume I could make an accurate judgement of your characteristics of a person in all contexts just from what I know of you here.
Am I wrong? Do you think that I can look at your posts and conclude exactly how smug and unattractive you are as a person? And if I can’t, what makes you think you can do that to Toggle and others with any more accuracy?
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@Robert Liguori — Face to face I have my physical presence. Here I do not. Furthermore, topics such as “Is it okay to mock and bully weird trans kids on the Internet” is inherently adversarial, given that a few people here think that it is. This is not the normal conversation I have when I meet some cool people visiting my office, where we are more likely to talk about fashion or math.
(Or sometimes fashion *and* math, cuz being a femme math geek can be pretty delightful.)
(Although if someone brings up compile-time type checking versus it’s absence, well, that can lead to a fight!)
(Not really.)
(Well, sometimes. It depends.)
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@Robert – I’m gonna go with Irony. It still doesn’t seem like a useful response, but it at least makes some form of sense.
@Veronica – “Furthermore, topics such as “Is it okay to mock and bully weird trans kids on the Internet” is inherently adversarial, given that a few people here think that it is. ”
First off, how did we get from “calling tumblrites special snowflakes” to “Is it okay to mock and bully weird trans kids on the Internet”. It seems to me that you’ve made one hell of a leap there, or you think the “trans” category is broad enough that it could include, say, me. If “trans” is that broad I’m not sure how it’s a useful term, or why it’s wrong to mock “trans kids” any more than it is to mock Republicans.
Secondly, you are conflating mockery with bullying, and you are conflating mockery of a person’s choices with mockery of the person. Both of those seem wrong to me. Not all ideas deserve respect. Some ideas are laughable, and they deserve to be laughed at.
That doesn’t mean that you can’t have a conversation over which ideas deserve mockery, or whether an idea is being mocked fairly. This thread starts with Ozzy putting forward why they think Special Snowflake is a bad mock, and then a bunch of people agreeing and disagreeing and giving their reasons why. If you think the best reply to a defense of mockery IS mockery, then at least up your game and mock it in a way that communicates your disagreement.
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Grumble grumble Perl grumble.
That doesn’t really answer the question, though. If you choose not to answer the question and instead bring up a different, only-tangentially-related topic, that’s fine, but since I don’t really see anyone in this subthread asserting that, I question its being brought up here.
Although, I would like to point out the importance of “In this subthread.” There are lots of people who are saying that and worse, and given my own upbringing and heritage, I understand the desire to draw a fence around certain concepts. It is important to recognize that many of the people railing against special snowflakes are doing so because said individuals are often very easy to mock and score outgroup points against, but it’s also important to realize that not everyone complaining about them is doing so.
Of course, I could be misreading the thread. So, in the interest of clarification, I hereby request anyone who agrees that “Is it okay to mock and bully weird trans kids on the Internet” is an adequate summation of their position to say so, and I will cheerfully concede the point.
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@Veronica In the words of the ancient scholars- well, that escalated quickly.
I hesitate to defend myself, because a)smug, mean bullies often deny being any of those things, so it’s not that informative, b)I suppose I’m not in the best position to evaluate those traits in myself anyway, and c)I’m generally uncomfortable with getting in deeper in a sub-thread that is about me as a person, rather than about the topic at hand. I’ll just say text is a difficult medium in which to infer tone, and it sounds like you’ve developed some very strong conclusions based on some fairly ambiguous evidence.
You are, of course, welcome to interpret my language and my character in any way that you see fit. And to share those interpretations with whomever you like, I suppose. But I don’t really think that Ozy’s blog is enriched by this conversation, so I’ll bow out for now.
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@Toggle — Fair enough. Perhaps I misread.
To me “eyerolling” indicates contempt. It is what the “mean girl” does when the less popular kid says something “uncool.” Likewise, the railing against “Hallmark” stuff pattern matches with that kind of young, naïve person who thinks they are so much better than the broad culture, and in my experience these folks often end up on one of two paths: 1) they get over it and realize that, regardless of how superficial these things seem, they can be quite thoughtful from the right person, or 2) they end up isolated and angry at the world, but so perfectly convinced of their own superiority.
Unlike you, I do like to talk about personal experience, insofar as these topics are not isolated from society. If we are discussing math or computer science, then yeah, personal stuff plays a lesser role. (Although even then, I do often talk about how I came to realize things. For example, why I’m a finitist is a long story — but that’s waaaaay off topic.)
But for something like this, its *core* is how we relate to the world. So when you say you “roll your eyes,” that’s a personal thing. And why do you roll your eyes? You’re not better than those people. I mean, I’m sure you’re better than some. But I bet you’re worse than others.
You know, regardless of how you measure. Unless of course you measure in some completely self-serving way.
Anyway, those people are my people. I care about them. I will defend them.
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“But it is strange and destructive to be against people wanting to understand themselves better.”
If all the buzzwords and labels were about actually understanding themselves better, you’d probably actually see people identifying as them for the rest of their lives. I’ve never heard of any 40+ year old requiessexual bipoetisexual squidgender moongender aroflux lesbians. More often I hear about people looking back at that time in their lives as a phase where they were following trends.
To go with your sushi analogy, imagine that everything starts normally, and you have sushi restaurants. Only then one of them decides they’re no longer a sushi restaurant, they’re a sushi cafe. Or a sushi bistro. Or a sushi diner. Or a sushi parlor. Or a sushi pub. Sushi-house. Sushi trattoria. (and don’t try to tell them otherwise, because who are you to police their identity?!)
And then they start making up new words to describe things that already existed, or are miniscule parts of their menus. Some fancy new word meaning “we serve raw fish”, and some fancy new word for “we also serve cooked food”, and some new word for “we have side dishes”. Also throw in barbecue because one of the rolls comes with some barbecue sauce on it. Or there’s a Korean dish as well as a Chinese dish and a Vietnamese inspired dish, so each of those dishes warrant another subcategory of sushi establishment.
So now, instead of just “a sushi place”, you have a Korean/Chinese/Vietnamese/barbecue/pesca/uncooked/cooked/Sushi Megaplex, and they have Very Strong Opinions about their identity, even though admittedly they did just change it last week.
Starting to sound a little silly to you? Because that’s how it sounds to most people when young people on tumblr need a new word to “identify” as, for every aspect of their gender or sexuality (I sometimes find people older than me attractive, need a word for that! I sometimes like rough sex, need a word for that! etc.)
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@Anon – “Starting to sound a little silly to you? ”
Better yet, this is a testable claim. Do people deploy mockery when actual food service establishments do the exact sort of thing you used in your example?
Oh, hey, Starbucks jokes!
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[cw: cis-possibly-by-default dude talking freely about pronouns, transgender, and why people dislike (some) “special snowflakes” (disclaimer to cw: many trans people are not special snowflakes; many special snowflakes are not (even purportedly) trans)]
I think that most special-snowflake hate (as opposed to a sense of amused superiority) is a product of special snowflakes demanding (or being perceived as demanding) that other people “respect” their special snowflakiness, especially when that sense of entitlement is paired with claims of “oppression.”
(Note: “Special snowflake” is an inherently fuzzy term; for the rest of this post, I’m going to use it exclusively to describe those to whom the previous sentence applies.)
With gender, this manifests as special snowflake S demanding that other people use S’s preferred pronouns[1][2] when talking about S, even when they’re not talking to S. With triggers, it manifests as S demanding that everyone tag for X[4], not just in order for S to want to talk to them, but in order to qualify as a remotely decent human being. Or as S being outraged that tumblr staff “blatantly hate their users with disabilities/their mentally ill users,” as shown by their changing the website design ever and/or playing April Fool’s Day pranks. Or, in one particularly spectacular case that I saw, S demanding that people not post animated gifs on tumblr to avoid oppressing people with epilepsy by forcing them to take active measures to protect themselves.
A couple posts ago, you linked a tag on an anti-sj tumblr that you described as “mocking people’s lists of weird triggers.” But while that accurately describes some of those posts, I’d say that at least half were not just listing triggers, but making demands related to them. Of course that results in hatred. Outside of some BDSM subs, no one likes being bossed around, or accused of being a bad person if they won’t comply, and even those who have that kink don’t generally appreciate it from random strangers on the internet.
[1] I want to distinguish two arguments, the first of which has two variants: (1) “[variant a] I am a man/woman/neither [variant b] I have a right to be who I want to be, [both] and you’re violating my right to be who I [am/choose] if you don’t use my preferred pronouns” vs. (2) “Whether you regard this as rational or not, it causes me dysphoria when people use my dispreferred pronouns, and dysphoria is awful, so please be kind and don’t do that.” The latter strikes me as perfectly reasonable[3]; the former, not so much. But this blog is literally the only place I’ve ever seen the latter made explicitly (I may have seen statements elsewhere that potentially imply it), while I’ve seen the former made explicitly on multiple occasions, including in trans 101 presentations. Even from people who aren’t otherwise special-snowflaky, that gets my hackles up, in much the same way as (for a more “mainstream” example) right-wing Christians claiming that not allowing crosses or manger scenes on public land is persecution.
[2] This is, of course, orders of magnitude worse when S’s preferred pronouns are zie/hir/hirself (let alone star/brightness/glowself) than when they’re one of the basic three.
[3] It does still trigger my “Is that really not fixable with proper therapy?” reaction pattern, but that’s true of all sorts of things, many of which are far more prevalent and socially accepted, a fair number of which apply to me, and at least some of which probably are not fixable after all. In any event, even if something is (in principle) fixable, that doesn’t mean that reasonable accomodations shouldn’t be made for its current existence.
[4] Again, this is extra angering if X is something like “trypophobia,” as opposed to something like “rape.”
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Gah, that “em” tag was supposed to cover a single word (“to”).
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BDSM subs get to negotiate who bosses them around, how, and especially when. Might be my sense of humour’s not out of the hospital yet, but I don’t think that’s a fair comparison.
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Uh, that was sort of my point. I said that a lot of people who appear to get hated or mocked for (purportedly) having weird triggers are actually getting hated/mocked for making demands related to their (purported) triggers, and that a reaction of hatred and/or mockery is perfectly natural since ” Outside of some BDSM subs, no one likes being bossed around, or accused of being a bad person if they won’t comply, and even [BDSM subs, who might like that sort of thing in the right context] don’t generally appreciate it from random strangers on the internet.”
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Gah. Oh, for a Retraction button.
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I think nearly everyone in this thread is wrong but me, so I’ll just put a few points out there:
1. You’re all wrong about people’s motivations for adopting obscure labels. Generally people do it because it enhances the feeling (or illusion, if you’re cynical) of a shared experience. If there’s a word for squidgender, that means that some people use it, even if it’s not many.
2. Also you can tag #squidgender. 100% practical.
3. I will say one thing negative about the pattern. If you see everyone else around you with such specific words, you start thinking that if you don’t have a specific word, it must be because your experience is so unusual that no one else shares it. Then you invent a word and someone else likes it and you feel better.
4. I’m pretty sure people who use these terms know not to use it in every context. Generally people don’t like being mocked. If they tell you an obscure identity directly (rather than putting it on a public webpage), it’s usually because they hope you’ll like it and spread it around.
5. Okay, I’ll say another negative thing about the words. Tumblrites generally underestimate how much work it takes to establish a term. Call it newbie optimism.
6. When people mock “special snowflake” words, they often completely mix the really obscure ones with ones which are actually really well-established. I’m not up on my gender terms, but I know aroflux is fairly obscure and requiessexual is super obscure. Wtfromantic is practically a fundamental category of romantic orientation, for serious. In the sushi analogy, contra above commenter a “sushi bistro” sounds entirely reasonable and there are like five of them nearby.
7. I use “gray-A” to describe myself, which I guess would also be lumped in with the special snowflake terms. But it’s actually based on the opposite philosophy, because it’s meaning is intentionally very broad and non-specific.
8. People who like lots of specific labels and people who don’t like specific labels can and do coexist.
9. Lots of people accept the idea that some of their identities may be transient. If you’re horrified that people are shoehorning themselves into nominally permanent identity boxes, that’s mostly projection on your part.
10. I have a long list of complaints about rationalist lingo, and how very little of it is actually as essential as rationalists believe, how it’s used in inappropriate contexts where nobody understands them, how it’s used for signalling, or to make you sound smart. Also a lot of it’s based on sci-fi, which is aesthetically terrible. But on reflection, my complaints are just negative feelings and I cop to that.
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” In the sushi analogy, contra above commenter a “sushi bistro” sounds entirely reasonable and there are like five of them nearby.”
You’re missing the forest for the trees. Yes, any *one* of the qualifiers is not, in and of itself, silly or nonsensical. But “bistro” was one of *seven* examples, with multiple subcategories added on.
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Generally people do it because it enhances the feeling (or illusion, if you’re cynical) of a shared experience. If there’s a word for squidgender, that means that some people use it, even if it’s not many.
I think this is a source of major inferential distance, not only with people who are more “mainstream,” but also with people who are weird, but don’t have this impulse.
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This. I think my brain is a decent fit for a bunch of these labels, if I didn’t see the labels themselves as odious.
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11. I think some of the weirdest, obviously just-made-up labels are intentionally absurd — just a wry, humorous way to say “the idea of sorting everyone into N pre-defined boxes by property X is silly, and we’re going to keep making up new boxes until you give up”.
So, most people who complain about them are profoundly missing the point. And there are few things as annoying as someone who basks in their imagined superiority.
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Mostly as a joke: we’ve got some fixed amount of respect reserved for a stranger. The more a person demands us to respect certain things, the less respect is left for that person.
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>There is a common criticism of people (okay, of Tumblr denizens) for being special snowflakes.
Actually, it’s always aimed at TEENAGERS. (Not saying this is good/bad, mind.)
Certain teenage subcultures – Goths, fans of various things (Twilight, for example), Hipsters, both ends of the nerd/jock dichotomy – are perceived by some people as based in an … overestimation of one’s “specialness” or uniqueness, associated with late adolescence.
Every crush is Undying Tragic True Love that will be written in letters of fire across the history books. Every interest is The Most Insightful Thing, the greatest work of beauty and art and truth ever created, that speaks to your very soul. Every minor feud is a war between Good And Evil, in which you are oppressed by Evil Mutants.
In reality, this isn’t a perfect map, it isn’t always bad, and it isn’t limited to teenagers. But it is a real thing; a mixture of egocentric bias, naivete, and the Spotlight Effect, with a healthy helping of clumsy status grabs added into the mix.
In truth, there’s nothing inherently wrong with a group that’s interested in the details of sexuality developing a vocabulary around that – quite the opposite, in fact. Plenty of online communities have done just that; porn sites, fanfiction communities of all stripes, and even places like 4chan all have their own jargon and vocabulary related to sexuality. This is fine and normal; indeed, it’s a good idea. They might get ribbed for being perverts, and if they dip into teenage overspecialness then they’ll get mocked for that, but in general the mere use of jargon is not considered inherently bad here. It serves an obvious and useful purpose.
However, people do not perceive Tumblrites as engaged in this. Honestly, I don’t really participate, so I can’t be sure either way. But people see it as part of an immature pattern of behavior; and that pattern is real, even if it is not responsible for Tumblr genders. (And this is the main reason why people dismiss trans people as Special Snowflakes, I think; it’s guilt by association.)
The issue, I think – and this bit is just my personal guess – is that it’s because there is so little content on Tumblr. So much of it is simply devoted to reblogging other people’s work. So there is a perception, and one I share (although I’m not too confident in it), that Tumblrites are spending their time finding excuses to argue over nothing.
If Tumblr were a forum devoted to gender discussion, even, I don’t think the issue would come up. But Tumblr doesn’t have a set topic; so it’s easier to argue that it’s just teenagers finding an excuse to pretend to be Unique And Special, to be protagonists.
And BTW, LessWrongers are often accused of being Special Snowflakes too. I’m surprised you haven’t picked up on that.
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I don’t read tumblr, so it occurs to me “special snowflake” might have different connotations there.
Google n-gram doesn’t find any uses of “special snowflake” in the books it tracks.
“Certain teenage subcultures – Goths, fans of various things (Twilight, for example), Hipsters, both ends of the nerd/jock dichotomy – are perceived by some people as based in an … overestimation of one’s “specialness” or uniqueness, associated with late adolescence” I think a lot of attacks have the underlying premise that someone has claimed too much status. This being said, I think there’s something different and weird about the hatred of goths. It’s like an immune reaction to a subculture which infuriates the people who don’t like it as much as it suits the people who do like it.
My feeling about “special snowflake” is that it’s a way of telling people they deserve no attention at all, which may speak to my issues. Perhaps it actually means “shut up, shut up, shut up, you’re getting on my nerves”, which is not quite as global.
Thoughts about what’s intended by “special snowflake”?
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The first time I remember encountering the term in a pejorative sense was probably Fight Club:
Tyler Durden: Listen up, maggots. You are not special. You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake. You’re the same decaying organic matter as everything else.
…As an explicit rejection of the 80s-90s era after-school-special message of “everyone is important and unique” that was repeated ad nauseam, well past the point of cliche and approaching They-Live-style brainwashing. Fight Club resonated with me because it seemed like a perfect critique of a culture that was sensitive to a fault and mindless beyond belief: all nerves and no brain. Defining yourself by your fighting ability might not be a very good idea long-term, but it’s at least *something you can do*, something *actually unique*, as opposed to your job title or furniture choices.
When I first got into Fanfic, “Special Snowflake” was a term that usually went along with “Mary Sue” to denote characters whose uniqueness was communicated in the most banal, superficial ways: hair color, eye color, skin color, cliche origin stories of angst and tragedy, that sort of thing. “Special Snowflake” characters happen when a writer has no understanding of Character at all, of what makes humans interesting and memorable. This usage carried over into DeviantArt, and meshed up nicely with the “ORIGINAL CHARACTER DO NOT STEAL” meme.
When I was studying art, the term was frequently used. As we saw it, there were two kinds of artists: talkers and shippers. Shippers got things done, obsessed over how to expand their skills, delivered work complete and on time and let their pieces speak for themselves. Talkers didn’t practice or study technique, handled critique poorly, and always needed to explain their pieces and their blown deadlines. It seemed to us that they were more interested in being an artist than in actually doing art. They were in it for the identity, for the status, for the attention, for a chance to get everyone to sit and listen while they explained how their abstract bullshit was totally symbolic of society’s blah blah blah blah. They were Special Snowflakes.
On the internet, I think Kazared did a pretty decent job of describing the attitude behind the term in his analysis of anon culture:
…The internet is vast, faceless, and impersonal. For me, those items are features, not bugs. Right now, this comment section is a bunch of random people exchanging ideas, and for me at least, you all might as well be anons. Ozzy’s April Fools article talked about how weird it was that on earth, *everyone is constantly talking about their genitals*. The internet fixed that, and now Tumblr is trying to break it again.
There’s a lot more to the term. Other people in the thread have mentioned the way the labels seem like a status attack or like a costly tribal signal system, etc, but the above is what I think of when I hear “special snowflake”. It’s saying that the way they’re trying to get attention is a good indicator that you shouldn’t give them any.
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So don’t.
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By all means, show me the door that I can put between myself and all of tumblrkind and its knock-on effects, without also walling off an unacceptable fraction of the rest of the world. I will make use of it immediately.
In the meantime, it looks like I’m forced to live in the same world as the rest of humanity, and bad memes have to be dealt with one way or the other.
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@ anonymousCoward
RE: anon culture
If I knew nothing about 4chan, I would have found Kazerad’s essay persuasive. But I do know a little about 4chan, and I have to conclude that Kazerad knows even less than I do.
In short, my opinion is this: if we wanted to build more communities that would gleefully harass the parents of a dead kid for a year because his classmate wrote shitty eulogy, or have high quality futurological discussions like this one, spreading anon culture might be a good idea. However, I think non-anon communities like SSC, ToT and LW produce much better output, so let’s spread their culture instead.
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[CW: blatant sarcasm, nerd-abuse, boundless cynicism, I don’t really believe this]
Oh I agree, which is why it is okay to relentlessly mock male nerds. In fact, we should relentlessly abuse and marginalize anyone who makes us mildly uncomfortable, so they go hide in their houses or under rocks or whatever, just so we don’t have to see them.
Unless they do something cool of course. Then we will take that from them. Just cuz we can.
Oh wait! That’s not true at all.
My point is, you live by the sword, you die by the sword. You wanna play status games with me, you’ll lose badly. After all, I’m a SJW who is pretty, wealthy, and smart. Plus I know how to talk to people to get them to like me. Attractive people smile at me and I smile at them.
You can come after me. I’ll just laugh and make you look stupid in public.
For example, how is gamergate doing in the media?
And why shouldn’t I do this? After all, men are all “privileged,” so if I can bring low that annoying nerd boy, make him just miserable, then — well — laugher feels good.
Cry nerd, cry. You’re probably ugly anyhow.
[End CW]
#####
THERE IS A REASON I DO NOT DO THIS. THERE IS A REASON THIS IS NOT OKAY.
It is this: the nerdy men who are *easy to attack* are often the most marginalized, those with significant social issues, often neurological or psychological impairments, and so on. They‘re the easy targets.
Abusing the weak is pretty fucking shitty.
I repeat: Abusing the weak is pretty fucking shitty.
And thus is abusing the weirdo kids on Tumblr. Leave them alone. They’re young. They’re trying to figure shit out. A lot of them are for-realz autistic or otherwise bad-brained. They’re the easy targets. Going at them is a coward’s game.
Wanna step up? I’m a SJW. I believe these “memes.” Try to insult me, instead of the weird kids on Tumblr.
I’ll just laugh. After all, I’m pretty with brightly colored hair, which basically makes me like an anime hero.
#####
I am blessed to live in the world with the rest of humanity — endlessly curious people. Some of them are quite attractive after all.
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Veronica, I’m not sure you /do/ know how to talk to people to make them like you, you’ve certainly failed at that pretty uniformly, in this space. Your constant turns to insult over substance, and self-aggrandizement over thoughtfulness have specifically caused me to mark you in my head as “Low -status, unpleasant, but amusingly wrong at times.”
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Wow. Apparently Veronica’s demonstration of what NOT to do was too effective for some of us, even with the sarcasm tag.
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I’m pretty sure “in this space” refers to the entire thread, not to that one comment.
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@soosoos — I am socially and professional successful, which has much to do with my kindness, my integrity, and the support I give to others. I am actually a huge fan of people. I believe in sociability, such that when people rail against “signaling” or “status,” to me it sounds like sour grapes. I have a different view of those terms. To me they denote the joyous sharing of time with others. “Status” mean “being liked.” “Signaling” mean “expressing myself.”
I also speak my mind. There are people I do not like. I often tell them. There is abusive behavior. I point it out. Often this abusive behavior emerges from people who themselves have been abused. Bullies are people who were bullied.
It’s important to talk about this. But when people *advocate* bullying, I will point out where that road leads.
Lots of people hate the popular kids. Often the popular kids are really quite nice.
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@Nita – “In short, my opinion is this: if we wanted to build more communities that would gleefully harass the parents of a dead kid for a year because his classmate wrote shitty eulogy, or have high quality futurological discussions like this one, spreading anon culture might be a good idea. However, I think non-anon communities like SSC, ToT and LW produce much better output, so let’s spread their culture instead.”
I would argue that Anon Culture is more comparable to, say, Social Media culture or blog culture, the later of which SSC, ToT and LW would be a small subset of. On that scale, 4chan seems pretty good to me. How much harassment is organized through and facilitated by, say, Facebook? How many awful internet shit-storms have started via blog? Yeah, the examples you give are awful, but honestly I don’t feel they are representative of the environment I saw when I used to hang out there. Then again, I never went to /pol/. Did you spend much time on /tg/?
@VeronicaD – I don’t think mockery is a synonym for bullying or abuse. For one thing, it’s hard to bully or abuse an idea, but you can easily mock one. It also seems to me that there is a difference between mocking someone’s ideas, positions, ideology, tribe, or whatever, and mocking the person themselves. Ideas, positions, and ideology can be and frequently are ridiculous; mockery is one of the ways to point that out and hopefully conveys a description of what exactly is wrong with them.
In this specific case, “special snowflake” seems to me to be an accurate, pithy expression for what is wrong with the Tumblr community: they are drunk on identity politics well past any useful point, and they are sufficiently entitled that they frequently confuse ignorance or an unwillingness to humor their whims with bigotry and oppression. I find that contemptible, and I have a handy phrase at hand to communicate that contempt.
I don’t see messed up people making an earnest attempt to sort their fucked up lives out, I see bored, priggish juveniles trying to make themselves look deep with jargon and poorly-understood slogans. Then again, Tumblr is probably a big place. Maybe we’re looking at different parts of it?
In any case, I have no idea where you’re getting the idea that anyone is arguing in favor of bullying or abuse of any kind. My position is that some ideas are bad, and if you think you see a bad idea, you should fight it. Mockery is occasionally helpful to that end.
“Wanna step up? I’m a SJW. I believe these “memes.” Try to insult me, instead of the weird kids on Tumblr.”
This is what I’m talking about. You seem to see disagreement, even bitter disagreement, as vicious hostility. I think the kids on Tumblr are behaving in a stupid, self-destructive and anti-social way, and that it would be better not to encourage them. From this you conclude that I’m a bully who likes hurting the weak? As for attacking the memes, see above and the rest of the thread.
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@VeronicaD – “It’s important to talk about this. But when people *advocate* bullying, I will point out where that road leads.”
…Weren’t you arguing in favor of Rebecca Watson’s “Doxxing is fine as long as it happens to the right people” position? Like, I’m arguing that the term “Special Snowflake” is sufficiently descriptive that it serves a useful purpose, and you seem to think that’s beyond the pale, and an argument for bullying and harassment. But I seem to recall that I’ve seen you argue in favor of actual, genuine, 100% fuck-peoples-lives-up-in-a-serious-and-lasting-way harassment, presumably because Some People Deserve It?
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@anonymousCoward: Interestingly enough, I’m not even a chan-ite, and I made a note to bring up /tg/ when I saw Nita’s comment earlier (on my phone, which is crap for commenting), just based on threads I’ve been linked to. Even there, there’s some bits that are dodgy/problematic/uncool (e.g. the casual use of “faggotry” to mean “anything I regard as uncool”), but it still strikes me as obviously far better than tumblr or twitter, and probably better than facebook as well.
Regarding mockery vs. bullying: I think a very important distinction that no one has thus far made in this thread is where the mockery occurs. Reblogging someone’s stupid-but-not-immoral “galaxy-kin” post to laugh at it, so that your laughter appears in their notifications? Really shitty. Posting about it on Tumblr in Action, where they have no reason to see it unless they’re into TiA themselves[1], and there’s a rule against contacting the people being mocked? Probably not the most virtuous thing to do, but fundamentally okay. Copy-and-pasting to your own tumblr, where they won’t see it by default, but there’s a non-trivial chance it will end up on their dash anyway? Somewhere in between, I think.
[1] And if so, then live by the mockery, die by the mockery. And/or fire back in the comments.
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@Osberend – For my purposes, the mockery I’m defending is as simple as using the term “special snowflake” in conversations much like this one. A similar argument might be had over the term “Social Justice Warrior”, which is likewise used as a pejorative to communicate contempt for certain types of behavior. I think mockery is useful as a rhetorical device to attack bad ideas. Like “that idea is so messed up that it is actually pretty funny”, not “I don’t like what you say so I’m going to call you stupid and ugly”,
I’m not 100% sure I’m right about that; maybe Charity is strictly superior in all situations. It doesn’t seem intuitively obvious to me that it is, though.
Maybe I’m using the word inappropriately?
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@ anonymousCoward & osberend
I took a look at /tg/ just now, and it doesn’t seem different from a typical forum. Still not seeing any goodness specific to anon culture.
I’m not saying that anon culture is guaranteed to produce horrible results. Certainly, the examples I linked are not examples of 4chan at its best. But these are the kinds of things 4chan is known for, just like Tumblr is known for “special snowflakes”.
As for generalized social media and blog cultures, I don’t think they exist. Facebook is so normal that it doesn’t have its own culture, Twitter has some culture-ish features, Tumblr can be said to have a culture, but it’s not universal. Different types of blogs have different cultures. And, to the extent that /tg/ is substantially different from /pol/, there’s no anon culture, either.
Also, shitstorms can be useful for bringing disagreement to the surface, along with the associated arguments and experiences. Long-term harassment of people who have done absolutely nothing disagreeable to anyone is pure harm with no upside.
So, aC’s original point was that identities are bad, and Tumblr culture is bad for encouraging them (side note: most Tumblr labels describe people’s minds, not genitals). But I’ve seen real-name, long-term-pseudonymous, casual-pseudonymous and full-anon communities do both good things and horrible things, depending on the local subculture. Thus, I don’t think identity is the deciding factor here.
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I seriously doubt that most people who engage in mockery do so after an in-depth analysis of costs and benefits.
In my personal experience, applying more charity than I thought was necessary has often led to unexpectedly good results, while applying mockery that seemed completely justified has often resulted in a degradation of discourse quality.
From this I conclude that my brain is biased in favour of mockery, and I’m 85% certain that the same is true about everyone who has defended mockery in this thread, and some of those who have spoken out against mockery.
You do remember that the “ideas” we’re talking about here are identities, right? Some people laugh at the idea that people can be trans, for example — how would you separate this mockery from the mockery of trans people?
IMO, “the idea of transness is so messed up that it is actually pretty funny” is way more harmful than “everyone who disagrees with me is stupid and ugly”.
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@Nita – “I seriously doubt that most people who engage in mockery do so after an in-depth analysis of costs and benefits.”
Perhaps Mockery is not the best term, then. Identifying and pointing out the ridiculous nature of some ideas is called rudeness, and I’m willing to bite the bullet and accept that the truth is occasionally rude.
“In my personal experience, applying more charity than I thought was necessary has often led to unexpectedly good results, while applying mockery that seemed completely justified has often resulted in a degradation of discourse quality.
From this I conclude that my brain is biased in favour of mockery, and I’m 85% certain that the same is true about everyone who has defended mockery in this thread, and some of those who have spoken out against mockery.”
This is excellent advice, and seems to mesh well with what I’ve seen (and unfortunately contributed to) in the last few threads of SSC. My question is, if discussion is essentially the Prisoner’s Dilemma, and Charity is how we hope to precommit to cooperation, how do you handle the opponent who announces their intention to defect from the beginning, and gleefully do so at every opportunity? That is, how do you deal with the situation where, by your best judgement, it is clear that your opposite has no intention of interacting in good faith?
One could presume that such people are rare enough that they do not need to be accounted for, but this does not match my experience in the world, nor my understanding of history. One could commit to avoiding such people, but the trouble is that such people have a habit of also being militantly expansionist. My best guess would be that at that point, you fight. If you have a better suggestion (and your reasonable tone and insights incline me to believe that you very well might), I’d be interested in hearing it.
“You do remember that the “ideas” we’re talking about here are identities, right? Some people laugh at the idea that people can be trans, for example — how would you separate this mockery from the mockery of trans people?”
Well, for starters, it seems to me that the trans movement earned the respect it has through the blood and misery of its members. There is actual history, research and specialized care and treatment, and so on. Meanwhile, a significant plurality of the Tumblrites seem pretty clearly to be using pronouns for personal amusement and as a cheap social engineering tactic. I understand that this is not an ideal answer, and I would certainly prefer we prevent the tragedies rather than reacting to them, but that does not seem to be how the world works now or in the foreseeable future.
“IMO, “the idea of transness is so messed up that it is actually pretty funny” is way more harmful than “everyone who disagrees with me is stupid and ugly”.”
I put forward that the former, while obviously a much uglier thought in its implications, has the virtue of actually engaging the question with a concrete statement, and thus opens itself up to empirical refutation. I believe I’ve seen it mentioned that sufferers of gender dysphoria have resorted to slicing bits off or injecting caulk to modify their bodies into a less unacceptable state. Humor varies, but I think we can all agree that doesn’t sound funny at all. In what way is that comparable to a suburbanite teenager whose decided that their intricate personal identity matrix must be jealously guarded by lecturing people who use words they don’t like on twitter?
I don’t doubt that a great many of the Tumblrites are fairly fucked up. I’m pretty fucked up myself. Most people are, it seems. I don’t think the special snowflake approach is a good solution.
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Uh, maybe? But calling someone a “special snowflake” has the same truth value as repeating their words in a funny voice — that is, none. It’s neither true nor false because the purpose is to insult, not to convey information.
You’ll need to explain what you mean by “defect” here.
But in this particular case, the usual situation is this: a tumblr kid writes their list of labels on their tumblr profile, then some 4channer or redditor finds them and posts a screenshot for lulz or karma. Who obviously had no intention to interact in good faith here — the tumblr kid or the redditor?
Uh, what?
Look, I’m not saying that pointing and laughing or sneering at people is always evil and never permissible, but I find attempts to portray it as virtuous or necessary extremely annoying, especially when the menace to be stopped by these heroic acts isn’t actually harming anyone.
You do realize that you’re saying, essentially, “I’ll stop being an asshole to these kids when they show me a doctor’s note, get murdered or engage in self-surgery”, right?
Well, I think a seventh-grader shooting himself isn’t funny either, but apparently 4chan disagrees. It turns out that humor varies very widely indeed.
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Wow.
I mean, I get it. To some degree our capacity to suffer has demonstrated — well *something*. But still, OMG what a mess-up up idea.
Like, imagine if I said [cw: nerd-abuse, I don’t believe this], “I’ll start caring about male nerds such as Scott Aaronson when their suicide rate ticks up another 11%.”
I mean, just, wow.
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@Nita – ” It’s neither true nor false because the purpose is to insult, not to convey information.”
I disagree, as noted previously, and as many other comments have said. The term describes what is seen as the core of the failure mode, both an obsession with ones’ “special” or “unique” personal identity description, and an expectation that others must grant special treatment because of this description. It slots neatly into the history of the terms’ use.
“You’ll need to explain what you mean by “defect” here.”
I’m swerving away from Tumblr in particular and toward a larger question that I have no good answer for, that I’ve been wondering about since I started reading SSC and ToT. If communication is a Prisoner’s Dilemma, it seems to me that Charity = cooperating. Using “Special Snowflake” doesn’t seem like Charity, so it’s not cooperating, so it must be defecting. Is cooperation and/or Charity a terminal value? Should you retract Charity when having extended it proves to serve no useful purpose? Should you cooperate when you have solid evidence that the other party intends to defect? If defection is useful, when and how?
“Who obviously had no intention to interact in good faith here — the tumblr kid or the redditor?”
The redditor, clearly.
Tumblrites write their lists of labels on their profile, claim that communication must be modified to fit those labels, and attack those others when they fail to, even in unrelated spaces. PlebComics made satirical comics about how this behavior is bad, and in fact violates the very ideals that social justice claims to be fighting for. Tumblrites declare the author a racist, sexist bigot, send them death threats, doxx them and get them fired from their job. Who obviously had no intention to interact in good faith – the Tumblrites or the author?
“Look, I’m not saying that pointing and laughing or sneering at people is always evil and never permissible, but I find attempts to portray it as virtuous or necessary extremely annoying, especially when the menace to be stopped by these heroic acts isn’t actually harming anyone.”
That does sound pretty awful, and I’m not sure it IS virtuous or even necessary. That’s why I’m asking for your opinion on whether it is or not, in the case where the people in question actually are harming people. If this doesn’t apply to tumblr, then forget tumblr. It’s a possibly divergent question, but one I’m very interested in.
It’s pretty clear that you really don’t like 4chan, and beyond mentioning that your experience there doesn’t sound like mine, I have no interest in defending the place further. It is a wretched hive of scum and villainy, but what does that have to do with the discussion at hand?
“You do realize that you’re saying, essentially, “I’ll stop being an asshole to these kids when they show me a doctor’s note, get murdered or engage in self-surgery”, right?”
A more charitable interpretation might be that the only available way to distinguish between legitimate life issues and narcissism/utility monstering is to require some form of factual evidence before you start making concessions. I am not aware of a better way to make the distinction, and it seems to me that narcissism and utility monstering are common and antisocial enough that ignoring them is unwise. We don’t have any problem with requiring people to actually be disabled in order to use disabled parking, yes?
I think what they’re doing is stupid, wrong, and harmful to themselves and others, and believe that this should be pointed out in discussions like this one. That doesn’t seem to match “being an asshole” to me, but the bullet seems biteable if I’m wrong.
VeronicaD – “Like, imagine if I said [cw: nerd-abuse, I don’t believe this], “I’ll start caring about male nerds such as Scott Aaronson when their suicide rate ticks up another 11%.””
I didn’t follow the Aaronson situation all that closely, but from what I gathered, you’d still be better than a good many of the *actual* responses. At least you’d be giving an explicit standard by which you’re measuring his claim, rather than simply denouncing him as a heretic. And then I would retort by asking why an additional 11% on the suicide rate is necessary. Why not 9%, or 5%? And given that the male suicide rate is actually significantly higher than the female one, why is that disparity alone not sufficient?
But all that misses the point. Those who DID take Aaronson seriously, did so because he backed his claim with evidence, provided by publicly revealing painful, personal secrets publicly at significant risk to his reputation. And even if one wished to argue that he provided nothing but anecdotes, he at least had reputation and status to back them with. Would a random male garage mechanic from Ohio get the same level of respectful dialogue if he walked into a feminist space and declared that they should stop talking about male privilege because he didn’t like it? You seem to be claiming that they should, but that is clearly not the world we live in.
If you want people to change their behavior, you have to give them a good reason. “Because I said so” is generally insufficient.
In the end, though, I am pretty sure I already knew your answer to the Big Question: defection is in some cases useful, charity is not a terminal value. What I’m trying to figure out is whether that is a *good* answer.
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We’re not comparing women to men, in which case I think the suicide rate is awfully mixed up in economic expectations and the failures of the manufacturing sector. This is real stuff, but rather outside of this topic. Instead, I am talking about the specific differences between trans people and lonely nerdy men. Trans people indeed have an objectively high suicide rate, compared to the general population. I don’t know the rate for lonely nerdy men, but I bet it’s lower than for trans women.
But then, you know, we are individuals, not types. I’ve never tried to kill myself. I thought about it. I did at one point have something that vaguely looked like plans. But whatever. I never really came all that close.
The point is, if someone says they are “sapiosexual,” I’m not going to demand a suicide note before I take them seriously.
Another point, *pain* is not the only reason to respect other people’s preferences. It’s a good reason. We should listen, just as I encourage people to listen to Aaronson (even as I encourage people to critique his wrong ideas on privilege; the point is to engage with him in good faith).
But I don’t only talk about my pain in being trans. There certainly was much pain. But more, there was the lost opportunity to thrive. This is not just the baseline, “well, I’m glad no one is too miserable.” That would be fine. But what if a bunch of otherwise really happy folks call themselves “the really happy folks club,” and want the basic respect of your calling their club that? But instead you mock them, cuz really happy people are obviously “status grabbing” — which seems to mean daring to be socially adept around people who are not. Or something. Whatever.
My big point, which underlies much of what I say on this blog: when you are okay with yourself, it’s easier to be okay with others. It is also easier to step out of the cycles of nonsense that have the Redditors and the SJWs trying to destroy each other’s lives. Yeah, someone got doxxed. Someone got swatted. Someone else got doxxed again. Death threats. Raaaarrrrrr!
But on some random Tuesday some random kid, who has never been all that socially accepted and is kinda struggling to figure out their sexuality, and so on — they get on Tumblr and start reading and discover that “blurrrglerapidwolfpacksameness-sexual” strangely describes how they feel. So yeah, that sounds a little bit silly. Okay, it sounds a lot of silly. But so what? If it helps them, then it helps them. They now have a little community where they get liked for free.
But there is the war! So they must pay!
They’re “status grabbing” — well, maybe. But maybe they’ve never had much status anytime ever. Just a little bit can go a long way, you know. Not everyone follows a straight-line path from childhood to maturity. Plus, they’ve probably been mocked enough already. Do not add to that.
Or else get good and mindkilled and join the war.
Which is fine. I used to be a part of the war. I still am, perhaps, to some degree. I still got a point of view. I still got stuff to say to male nerds that they don’t much like.
It’s funny when folks on “your side” talk about fighting meme wars, cuz that’s just what I used to say when justifying the same kind of shit.
But my side is better at it. Much better. You really don’t want to fight this way.
You can say, “Hey look, this SJW is just as bad as this {ranting racist, sexist shitbag}.” Maybe in some sense you’re right, but in a lot of ways you’re wrong. Cuz being a racist, sexist shitbag really stands out as being uniquely terrible.
Which is to say, you can find a lot of dumb shit from the social justice side, but you’ll have a hard time finding anything as nakedly awful as that “When I get my robot girlfriend all you feminists will pay!!!!” thread that Nita posted.
“Biocunts”? Really?
Seriously, those are some messed up people. There is a lot of obvious pain there, tons of resentment. It’s just thick with the detritus of failed lives.
I might feel sorry for them, except the part where they actively hate women.
Should I mock them? After all, those are some pretty terrible memes.
I don’t know. A lot of feminists read stuff like that and decide to strike back at those men. And what is the easiest way to hurt them, in the minds of these women?
Well, they’re probably ugly virgins, right? What else could explain their failures with women?
I mean, it’s probably half true, at least for a lot of them. But it’s not a good argument. It does not help. Plus it’s just crappy feminism. We should do better, support our own theoretical models.
On the other hand, the SCC comments section is not-so-slowly turning into a mindkilled anti-SJW circle-jerk. It hasn’t gone completely over. There remain commenters there pushing back, and not only SJ people. Sniffnoy, to pick a notable example, seems to be (to some degree) anti-SJW, but who is the opposite of mindkilled. Voices such as theirs, however, are becoming a minority.
So yeah, the war. It is everything.
Is this really how you want it? We’ll win.
I say you should be charitable to the Tumblr weird kids for the same reasons I need to be charitable to sad weird nerdy men.
Cuz the war is stupid and terrible.
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Lament, for I fear Veronica is right.
(Perhaps we need a meta-war on the war or something. Or to just get on with our lives? IDK)
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On the other hand, the SCC comments section is not-so-slowly turning into a mindkilled anti-SJW circle-jerk.
I don’t think this is a result of the same people becoming more mindkilled. This is a result of blogs like David Friedman and Econlog advertising Scott’s existence. Previously, the SJ fights on SSC were between a)pro-SJWs, b)anti-SJW liberals, and c)neo-reactionaries. Scott clamped down on the neo-reactionaries to maintain balance, but at the time he wasn’t doing anything about plain-old Red Tribe conservatives and libertarians, because they were nearly non-existent. These people have come flooding in, and Scott hasn’t yet reacted to it.
I suspect they also don’t get as much pushback because from a liberal-but-anti-SJW POV, both the SJW and neoreactionary positions seem interesting and/or useful to argue with, but arguing with actual red tribers is seen as a waste of time and energy, as evidenced by… the entire rest of the Internet, and Crossfire, etc.
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VeronicaD – “On the other hand, the SCC comments section is not-so-slowly turning into a mindkilled anti-SJW circle-jerk.”
I agree, and regret having contributed to it. I think it might be possible to reverse the trend, and as of the later part of the last Links post, began trying to argue the other side as much as I could, ie, that Bradford’s challenge was a reasonable one.
“So yeah, the war. It is everything. Is this really how you want it? We’ll win.”
I rather think you won’t, actually. Your side seems to have a much easier time making enemies than friends, in my experience. Your comrades hate too fast and forgive too slow, and the obvious problems with your ideology keep expressing themselves in open fratricide. By de facto embracing a “revolutionary conscience” model of ethics, the movement generates an endless series of hypocrisies that must be covered up or explained away, thereby burning good-will it might otherwise turn to the cause. Social Justice’s gains have been significant, but it seems to me that the current generation is trading on goodwill amassed by their forebears, and that most of their success comes easy because the general population does not see where the movement is leading them.
Then again, if I think that my side’s victory is inevitable, it shouldn’t surprise me much that you think the same of yours.
Further, your question seems to boil down to “either you do what we say, or we fight, you lose, and then you do what we say”. To which the best and only answer is to fight and hope. I’ll spare you the Churchill quotations, but why accept counsel from despair? And who knows, maybe your side might realize that fighting has costs, and Charity and cooperation are better.
What I would like would be if the war were not inevitable, if Charity were sustainable, and if there were a way to achieve mutual understanding and reconciliation. Trying to explore that question is why I read and comment here. Your comments over the last several months have gone a long way toward convincing me that at least a willingness to fight is necessary. After all, that seems to be the position you are explicitly taking in this very comment, yes?
“We’re not comparing women to men”
Aaronson was, wasn’t he? I mean, he was engaged in a conversation about male privilege with feminists?
I said that asking for some measure of proof is what we all do when people ask for concessions. You said that this was an ugly thing to say, equivalent to demanding a high level of proof from Aaronson in order to listen to his complaint. But in fact Aaronson *did* to offer proof in order to have his complaint taken seriously, because that is *how human communication works*, and the alternative systems seem strictly worse. I don’t believe I’ve ever argued that the standard of proof needs to be high, only that the proof of the Trans community meets the standards of everyone in this conversation, so there doesn’t seem much danger of confusing them with the average affronted galaxy-kin.
“But what if a bunch of otherwise really happy folks call themselves “the really happy folks club,” and want the basic respect of your calling their club that?”
Do a few of their members have a conspicuous habit of kicking non-smiling passers-by in the groinal region and then doing a dance around their prone form? Does the rest of the group seem to either ignore this behavior or occasionally encourage it? Because if they did, I might argue that the happiness level of the club seemed rather less descriptive than their propensity for producing gratuitous frownie-groin-kickers.
You argue that the typical Tumblrite doesn’t bother outsiders. On sheer weight of numbers, you’re likely correct. I think that the minority who use their identity matrix as an excuse for bad behavior, and especially the way that tendency seems to be encouraged and reinforced by the tacit support of the “harmless” users outweighs the benefit of the model. The problem I see is that “respect people’s labels” has a common failure mode that “labels are how you gain respect”, which feeds into the failure mode of “labels let one define respect in an arbitrary way”, which leads to badness frequently enough that it is worth fighting.
“Yeah, someone got doxxed. Someone got swatted. Someone else got doxxed again. Death threats. Raaaarrrrrr!”
You say Tumblr’s culture is harmless. I point out an instance of harm. You say that harm is irrelevant. My model of you says that you think harm is pretty damn relevant when it’s your in-group being harmed, ie, being called “special snowflakes”. It also says that you are willing to accept a fairly large amount of harm for members of the out-group, provided it’s for what you consider to be a good reason. If that’s an accurate understanding, I don’t see how it is consistent with the principles of Charity.
“Which is to say, you can find a lot of dumb shit from the social justice side, but you’ll have a hard time finding anything as nakedly awful as that “When I get my robot girlfriend all you feminists will pay!!!!” thread that Nita posted.”
Two sentences into that link was enough to convince me that I had no desire to read further. Did they talk about why women should be gassed with Sarin, or shoveled en-mass into ovens? Because I’ve seen SJs say those things, in public and with their names and titles attached, rather than vomiting them out in an anonymous forum for Gross Edgelords.
https://archive.today/W2kyB
http://favstar.fm/users/geordie_tait
But the first problem is that we have an inferential gap on what “nakedly awful” means. You seem to see that /pol/ thread as more offensive than an earnest defense from an influential figure on Why It’s Okay To Doxx Bad People. The former seems deeply shameful, the latter should be deeply shameful and apparently is not, but is immediately and actively harmful. That seems much worse to me.
The second problem is that those /pol/ posters are not my side, in any sense that would not also put the ACLU “on the side” of the KKK. Meanwhile, the Tumblrites are following the ideology your movement taught them. They are attacking “Bad People”, and again, my model of your position says that’s A-OK, and would only disagree over who the Bad People actually are.
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Addendum – …man I wish these things had edit buttons.
@VeronicaD “I say you should be charitable to the Tumblr weird kids for the same reasons I need to be charitable to sad weird nerdy men.”
…And I say that you should be as charitable to the weird nerdy men as I am being to the Tumblr weird kids. Hell, if you have a succinct, pithy term like “special snowflake” for the failure mode you think I’m locked in, feel free to employ it. I put forward tentatively that “Ugly Virgin” is likely less to-the-point for the /pol/ scum than “Special Snowflake” is to the Tumblrites, but if you really think that’s the core of the problem, by all means say so.
What worries me isn’t that you think some weird nerdy guys might deserve to be critiqued using hurtful names. What worries me is that you seem to measure offense and acceptable punishment on different scales for different groups of people, presumably for Social Justice reasons. If your fundamental ethics differ based on whether “friends” or “enemies” are involved, where does Charity go from there?
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AC:
Now that I think about it, is Special Snowflake a particularly good or bad term? I mean, “I am a straight woman except for these cases A, B, and C.” is a pretty common case, all things considered; if a term of mockery covers it by implying exceptions to the general paradigm are unique and super-rare, it’s a bad term. In the specific context of a subculture grasping for ever more labels, I can see its use, but I don’t know if that context is really being communicated. And really, I think it’s a mental wrong turn, not a sign of actual moral wrongness myself; it seems much better to, if one must attack, attack the behaviors being facilitated by the labels than the labels themselves.
Oh, as a side note: Can we have a general agreement that Argumentum Ad Someone On Your Side Said Something Stupidum is bad and wrong? This is the Internet. Every cause has that one person who advocates for X, and wants to kill and eat all the non-Xers. This proves nothing about the cause whatsoever. I think it does prove something if there is a loud and vocal presence of targeted badness in a community, but I also think it’s so difficult to dig out this signal without actually doing surveys and similar that it’s almost never worth arguing about even when it’s there.
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@Matthew — I hope you are right. I value SCC very much. It’s one of the few places where people disagree with me in non-stupid ways. Or at least it used to be. (This is another place, obviously.)
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@anonymousCoward — I think you are doing the Outgroup Homogeneity Bias thing against SJ. Yeah, the stuff you talk about is real, and currently there is a perfect storm of terrible with viral social networks and broken behavior. But social justice has not only Shanley; it also has Janet Mock and Anita Sarkeesian and Julia Serano.
Plus our side are not the only ones with a problem on social networks. To say the least.
Which look, for every dumb tweet one finds from Shanley or Suey Park, I can find quite a few from someone with swastika tattoos, or someone who calls women “biocunts,” or any number of deeply ugly things that come out of anti-SJ.
I’m not going True Scotsman here. Shanley is real. Toxic “call out” culture is an actual thing. But so is Vox Dei, and Scalzi is simply a more attractive human being. We win a lot in the media. I don’t see this changing much.
Plus I think SJ has some very good arguments. Granted they are not the ones you’ll hear from Anger-Rage-Grrrr-Twitter. Fair enough. But the good anti-SJ arguments are not the ones you’ll hear much on Reddit.
Plus SJ has the ability to hook our wagon to LGBT rights and broad cultural feminism. To put it in NxR terms (which I feel dirty doing this), we play better in the Cathedral than anti-SJ, which constantly flirts with HBD and neo-reaction and other nonsense.
Our “crazies” (please forgive that term) are outspoken but oppressed women, or minorities, or queers, or all of these things. Your “crazies” advocate the superiority of the white race.
Anyway, this has something to do with the swimming habits of colossal Lovecraftian deities. We’ll win.
(It case it is not clear: I am not saying this is rational. I am saying it’s the way shit works.)
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In my estimation, the aspects of SJ that are most important are these — and I am leaving out the general ideas of non-oppression and opportunity, where I will assume broad agreement — anyway, the main issues are these:
1. Privileged lives versus oppressed lives are “ways of knowing the world.” This says simply that one’s experiences shape one’s values, and one’s values shape one’s perceptions. Specifically, a person who is comfortable and satisfied will see a situation through a very different lens than a person who is not [1]. For example, cis people are usually fairly ignorant of trans lives. They could learn about us; we do write books, but usually they do not. But still they *speak about us*. They are free to do that and their ignorance costs them little. It costs us much.
Which leads to the second factor:
2. Power is often expressed through discourse. For example, my gender is *questionable*. Yours (probably) is not. There are obvious historical reasons this is the case, but nevertheless it reflects the power of the broad cis public. It is oppressive. Cis people get to project false ideas onto us, and have them stick, and we cannot effectively reply. Sure, it is possible that a trans person could be broadly ignorant of a cross-section of cis people, but how much power does that one trans person have? Even if they have much power in some narrow social space, a cis person being abused by them can almost always move to a new space free of “anti-cis oppression.” It is far more difficult for a trans person to do the reverse.
I take these as empirical facts about the world. Furthermore, I see the situation as naturally unstable. The oppressed will not accept their oppression, unless they are so utterly crushed that response is impossible. But even then, entropy is a bitch. Give it time.
This means the progress of any amount of social justice will lead to more social justice. Furthermore, the battle lines will be about the discourse itself: Who gets to have a voice? Who gets to be above reproach, unremarkable, unquestionable, compared with whose lives are constantly a matter of debate?
Thus “lateral oppression” and “reverse discourses” are naturally occurring within social justice spaces. But this is not a particular flaw of social justice. Its absence has the same structures, but they are less visible to the privileged because the privileged sit on top. It is only when you hear the shit directed at you that we have always heard directed at us that you begin to notice.
Let me end on an (almost) positive note. This situation is unstable, but things can be unstable to various degrees. I think we will muddle through. I don’t think the situation is comfortable for most people. But so what? Comfort was *never* an option for me. And the privileged can be comfortable only if the oppressed are discomfited in the extreme. Neither of these look like justice, but perfect justice was never an option.
I support liberal polices, although my heart is radical. The reason for this is, I support harm reduction over perfect success. I support mitigation, while still keeping an eye on the reality of oppression. I support messiness, compromise, ambiguity. I don’t like bright moral lines. These things to not work. Tidiness is not an option. Things will not be legible.
But we’ll muddle through. It will suck for some people sometimes.
[1] I hope it is obvious how to apply intersectionality to this. A person can be comfortable in some ways and very uncomfortable in others. This will shape their lens in specific ways.
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@Robert – “it seems much better to, if one must attack, attack the behaviors being facilitated by the labels than the labels themselves.”
Sounds reasonable. Do any terms come to mind for “assumes arbitrary labels, and uses them to demand concessions from others”?
“This proves nothing about the cause whatsoever.”
That is true. /pol/ doesn’t represent my views in any meaningful way, and I don’t claim Tait represents Veronica’s. On the other hand, to the extent that Veronica believes that Bad People Getting Hurt is an acceptable cost of doing business, it seems pertinent to point out the consequences of that ideology in the wild.
VeronicaD – “I think you are doing the Outgroup Homogeneity Bias thing against SJ.”
[CW: oppositional view of Social Justice]
It seems to me they are waving your banners, shouting your slogans, and preaching your ideology. Their excesses are clearly implied by your theories. My argument is not that Social Justice cannot produce good people, but rather than it *definitely* produces bad ones, and often enough that the system is unworkable at scale. They devastates lives, en mass and in public. Until you figure out a way to either fix that or throw such people out of the movement, you will be judged by their actions. That does not seem unfair or even uncharitable to me. If Social Justice cannot even manage itself, why should we trust it with Society?
My side does not have these problems. /pol/ and I do not share an ideology. The gentlemen with swastikas have no connection to me. We do have the problem that some members of your side find it convenient to lie about us, conflating us with said anti-socials, but I am confident enough in the power of honesty that I do not fear this strategy long-term.
“Anyway, this has something to do with the swimming habits of colossal Lovecraftian deities. We’ll win.”
I am not a neoReactionary. Gay Marriage is not the same as claiming men should accept false accusations of harassment or rape to “raise awareness of the problems”.
Social Systems have to be livable to the extent that they are not enforced at gunpoint. It seems clear to me that the system Social Justice is trying to implement is not livable. Some of your more extreme comrades might be willing to try the gunpoint approach, but they mainly just prove the point. You’ll either fail when the population finds your system intolerable, or you’ll modify the system until it becomes tolerable. Neither of those outcomes seem bad to me, and both are hastened by resistance. The other option, that I am wrong and that Social Justice is livable, seems both acceptable and very unlikely to me.
Your movement empowers people, but it has no method for consistently and impartially enforcing responsibility. It seems to me that, structurally speaking, it doesn’t even recognize that such a mechanism is necessary. The more it advances, the more power and control it secures, the more destructive and chaotic it will become. We have ample historical examples of how this goes, from the French Revolution through the various Socialist and Communist experiments, through small-scale cults; when you create a system that grants power without responsibility, the system self-terminates. That seems a rather more solidly predictive model than Cthulhu.
And while I’m writing this very response…
http://lj.libraryjournal.com/2015/03/litigation/librarians-embroiled-in-lawsuit-alleging-sexual-harassment/#comment-360467
…There it is. That right there is exactly why I believe you are going to lose.
This was one of the three cases that came to my attention during the “Listen and Believe” campaign last fall. Two of the three have now turned out to be false accusations, and in both cases, Social Justice only doubled down after their claims were proven false. Even before the truth outed, the utter disregard by the Listen and Believe supporters for basic human decency is what convinced me that Social Justice was not worthy of it’s name.
If I am wrong, and you think that person is entirely out of line and has completely misunderstood everything Social Justice stands for, please say so. Please explain how. As near as I can tell, what they are saying is a direct product of your theoretical framework, but if I am wrong, I would very much like to know it.
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As for the rest, I thank you for the insights. I disagree on a great many points, obviously, but I fear I would be straining our host’s patience to lay them out in detail. The short and most salient version is that the public is never going to accept theoretical fairness over the practical, intuitive sort, and that describing the ruining of lives as “discomfort” is, again, the perfect encapsulation of why your movement is doomed. You do not seem willing to accept even the minimal amount of responsibility required to interact with the broader culture.
I think the future will be better for everyone than what we have now. I hope that future brings peace to you and yours. I do not think that will or can happen according to the plan you lay out.
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AC:
I don’t have a good term, which is kind of the point; I don’t think that in and of itself is worth pursuing and condemning.
I also get the impression that you disagree with Veronica on less than you might think. You both seem to agree that the people going “Hey, it’s wrong to treat people differently and deny them rights based on bullshit factors like race, sex, sexual preference, and so on.” will win. The big disagreement seems to be on whether or not the subgroup of the people who disagree who also make their claims under the social justice banner (c.f., the accusers in your above post) count as members of the social justice movement or not.
And group definitions are always squirrely. Prosperity Gospel is a thing for many Christians, for all that it directly contradicts the core of what everyone agrees Jesus said about money, power, and your responsibility to your fellow man. Is it meaningful to argue about whether or not people who believe in the Prosperity Gospel really are Christians or not?
I really don’t know. I don’t want to go as far as to say that defining group memberships is always political, but it’s very often so, and very often, dissolving the reference class and looking for different classifications is helpful.
Also, on that note:
Veronica, you do realize you accused a guy of Outgroup Homogeneity Bias towards SJ in the same post you assumed the reference class ‘anti-SJ’, and pointed out it contained Nazis? Is this another one of those deep irony things?
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I know exactly what I am saying. It is this: social justice includes Shanley and Lauralai Bailey and Futrelle and Scalzi and (I think I can say) Ozy and Sarkeesian and *me*. Anti-SJ contains Scott Alexander and Sniffnoy and Vox Dei and weev and Roosh and so on.
I am not saying these are happy categories, nor am I saying they feel like categories from within, but they seem to be how things shaped out. Life is like that sometimes. The WWII Allies included both the United States and the Soviet Union. Which, this wasn’t even the weirdest alliance in history. I’ve seen hard right-wing evangelical political groups make common cause with radical lesbian separatists — each group hates trans women that much. I bet folks here can think of alliances even more absurd.
Note, I am not saying that Scott Alexander actually agrees with Roosh about much. Obviously not. I am saying they are both opposed to contemporary social justice, thus the anti-SJ label applies to both.
Anyway, I’m not sure if these are stable categories. Time will tell. But till now the SJ brand has been pretty darn successful, and the anti-SJ brand has been laughably inept. For example, gamergate in the mainstream press.
Place your bets.
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Veronica, I’d like to try to sum up your position. Please tell me if I’ve got any salient facts incorrect:
Pro-Social Justice includes many good people, a whole mess of neutral people, and some people who range from just telling lies that advance their cause to wanting to Kill All (Cishet) Men, and saying this frequently.
Anti-Social Justice includes many good people, a whole mess of netural people, and some people who range from just telling lies that advance their cause to wanting to Kill All (Feminazi) Women, and saying this frequently.
Right now, the Some People group from the Anti group are in the news, because of their terrible behavior, vis a vis Gamergate.
Right now, the Some People group of the Pro group are in the news, because of multiple examples of people affiliated with Social Justice getting caught lying about incidents of rape or harassment, vis a vis the librarians and Rolling Stone’s coverage of UVA.
Given these facts, it’s clear to me that not only aren’t Pro-SJ and Anti-SJ happy categories, they’re not useful categories at all. They might be useful as brands, yes, but I bet that if you did a survey about the Some People Pro-SJ group, you would find the Anti-SJ brand uncomfortably large.
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@Robert – “I also get the impression that you disagree with Veronica on less than you might think. You both seem to agree that the people going “Hey, it’s wrong to treat people differently and deny them rights based on bullshit factors like race, sex, sexual preference, and so on.” will win.”
It seems to me that the general Privilege theory rounds to such discrimination in regular practice, a large plurality of Social Justice accepts this as the way things should be, and another large plurality sees arguing the point as a distraction. The sentiment behind the comment I linked was repeated elsewhere in more or less equivalent terms, and has been put forward before in other contexts. Early in the Murphy case, it was put forward as a philosophical solution to the question of his guilt or innocence, and gained some measure of popular support.
I think that this will cause so much damage that it will either gut Social Justice as a movement or have to be abandoned. My understanding of Veronica’s position is that they believe that the damage will be reasonably minimal, and that whatever damage is done is acceptable to bring down the system of Privilege we are currently trapped in. Those do not seem like equivalent positions to me.
“And group definitions are always squirrely. Prosperity Gospel is a thing for many Christians, for all that it directly contradicts the core of what everyone agrees Jesus said about money, power, and your responsibility to your fellow man.”
I happen to be a Christian. I would argue strenuously that their interpretation is deeply flawed, unbiblical, and in serious error. In other words, we’d kick off a doctrinal dispute, and argue it until they were driven back into obscurity (this happens every decade or two; PG is a recurrent organic failure mode). I don’t think I’d argue that they aren’t Christians, just that they are doing it very, very wrong and should check, lest they wreck. I wouldn’t support them teaching their views, but if they want help handing out food, there’s not much point in refusing.
On the other hand, Fred Phelps was, essentially, a heretic. He wouldn’t have been welcome at any Church I’ve ever been a part of or visited. His actions violated the Gospel categorically. We can’t very well stop him from using our name, but we can denounce him and refuse to associate with him in any way. Better to hand out food alone that in his company. Likewise with the /pol/ types and the swastika wearers.
The claim that men should accept false harassment or rape charges as a way of advancing social justice seems, to me, well toward the Phelps region. If Social Justice frequently produces such people, and it seems to me that it does, then that provides a valuable data point. If it then broadly declines to argue against their views, much less declaring them anathema and shunning the adherents, that is another data point.
If SJs like Chu and Watson argue that anyone who disagrees with the movement is “fair game”, and Reasonable-seeming SJs like Veronica defend their position, that is a third point, and I believe I am justified in pointing out a trend.
If you want a fourth data point, ask if Listen And Believe is still the necessary approach.
To be clear, I do not believe that anyone is “fair game”. I am not entirely convinced that The War is inevitable, but the above does sort of point that way and waggle its eyebrows suggestively. I intend to fight it by pointing out that Social Justice does actual harm and theoretical good in unacceptable proportions.
As Veronica says, place your bets.
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Tangential anecdote: I’ve heard it said that _The Fault in our Stars_ is so popular with teenagers because it’s about a relationship which is Important because the participants are, in fact, literally actually dying (rather than just metaphorically feeling like they are dying).
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I dislike Special Snowflakism because as far as I can tell, it impedes an important understanding about people. When we’re young, we have simple intuitions about a lot of things; there are men and women, men do one set of things while women do another set of things, and so forth.
Then we get a little bit of life experience and see that things are nowhere near that neat, that lots of people don’t fall into the neat categories, including the observer. And some people react by attempting to create ever-narrowing categories (and particularly, categories that cleave the world in a way convenient for them), and miss the bigger picture; that the maps we draw are not the territory, and that the fact that Al, Bob, and Chuck all identify as straight and male doesn’t tell you a whole lot about their exception cases. Maybe Al is quite fine sleeping with anything cute and in a skirt. Maybe Bob has an exception for one particular guy. The fact that they identify as straight tells you something about them, but it doesn’t tell you everything, and you’d be better able to make predictions not by creating sub-categories of straightness, but by just talking to Al, Bob, and Chuck, and assigning their preferences to them, not their category.
Creating a snowflake-hierarchy in good faith, and updating it as you meet more people almost ensures that you’ll grow out of it in time. What bothers me aren’t the teenagers, it’s the adults who devote brainspace not to saying “Here’s what I am!”, but “Here’s what you can and can’t be.”
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When I see text with a large density of words I don’t know, I automatically disengage with that text—my thought process runs something like “So many words I don’t know. Surely these can’t actually be English words. Or, okay, maybe they can, but I’d have to look up *all* of them to understand the text? Probably it doesn’t contain anything worth doing that for.”
This happens with literary criticism and theology as well as your example tumblr sidebar. Hard sciences get a pass and my reaction is instead “I am not smart/well-informed enough to understand this; oh well.”
Anyway, I think tumblr sidebars would have wider understandability and less mockery if they included definitions with their words.
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Isn’t there an enormous difference between saying “I don’t want to read this” and “it is okay to mock this person”?
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It seems to me there is.
Do you think mockery ever serves a useful purpose in human communication? For example, might it serve as a counter to what one might see as harmful and contagious modes of thought?
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There is an interesting parallel in political science — there has been discourse analysis that analyzes the difference between speeches by authoritarian and democratic officials, which generally finds that authoritarian speeches have a significantly higher nouns : verbs ratio. This is thought to be intended to distance the speaker from the audience, who are discouraged from paying too much attention to political matters.
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Why do you give a pass to ‘hard’ sciences but not literary criticism or theology? This is something that strikes me that a lot of people do (so I’m not singling you out to criticise you, this is a genuine query of interest).
To me, it seems science has assumed the aura of mystique and elitism that religion has been accused of using (I’ve recently seen yet another example of someone claiming that religion is all about cynical high priests using bafflegab to keep the peasants in their place while they cloak their secular power grabbing in terms of faith) so that professors and PhD holders and That Bloke Off The Telly (there’s a couple of them, so not picking on any one exemplar) are the new mediators of the deep knowledge, and they get away with exactly that – “oh, this must be complicated and I must be too ignorant or stupid to understand it, but Smart Person With Degrees assures me it is so, therefore I’ll take it on trust” – which they condemn in other fields of learning.
Why doesn’t this spill over for you into lit crit and the like? If science needs terms of art because there are concepts that are unclear and can’t be expressed in simple Plain English, then other bodies of knowledge need the same?
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There’s successful technology, which is considerable evidence that there’s some truth in science. There’s nothing comparable for literary criticism or theology.
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I’m confused by the tags on this post. I can understand ironic reclamation of a term, but usually one doesn’t do that in the same place and time that one is criticizing the non-ironic use of the term.
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Tags propagate to Tumblr, so I tag my blog posts with the relevant tags I use on my tumblr. That’s why all blog posts are tagged “Ozy blog post” (blacklisting purposes).
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I am generally thankful when people I probably wouldn’t want to associate with make identify themselves clearly, so keeping the tags is alright with me.
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We’re talking about Tumblr as if it’s one monolithic cultural entity, and it’s not. I interact with a very small part of it for my own particular interests; there are swathes of Tumblr blogs I ignore or am completely unaware of their existence, and I’m sure there are the same for my blog.
So there isn’t one Tumblr culture, and I think falling into the trap of talking about it as if the entirety of Tumblr is made up of SJW Special Snowflakes is wrong. There are communities that use Tumblr (as others used LiveJournal, Dreamwidth, etc.) to discuss their interests.
And a lot of them are messed up kids, or even bored brats with privilege trying to pass themselves off as oppressed. There’s one person I’m a bit annoyed with, who seems to be changing their mind every five minutes as they find an even more marginal identity to be hyper-oppressed about.
But on the other hand, this person does have real-world problems to face – not because of the Special Snowflake persona problems they’re using, but ordinary everyday ‘you’re fat/ugly/stupid/useless’ problems that a lot of us have to deal with. Maybe being a Special Snowflake is their way of handling that. It’s probably better than them cutting themselves and seriously considering suicide.
And you know something else? It’s no skin off my nose! I may find them annoying, but that’s easily solved: I just have to unfollow their blog and hey presto, no more Special Snowflake posts popping up on my dash! They’re young, they live thousands of miles away from me, they have no power over me or influence on my life.
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I agree, and I’ve often criticized people in anti-SJW spaces for devoting time to picking on “special snowflakes”. Most of them are either mentally ill or very young, and they aren’t hurting anybody. I’d rather mock the evil than the weird.
That said, the ones who are clearly doing it for bullshit self-aggrandizement (“godspouses” come to mind) and seem old enough to know better are fair game. Some people’s egos need puncturing, and that’s as true of the weird as of anyone.
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…Wait. You think that bullshit self-aggrandizement is a more likely explanation for godspouses than schizophrenia?
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I may be biased by the fact that I knew a godspouse in real life who was definitely not schizophrenic, but was the kind of person one avoids at parties. I don’t know what the actual numbers are.
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Some people may be hesitant to attribute bullshit self-aggrandizing behavior to schizophrenia because they don’t want to accidentally insult schizophrenics if it turns out to be an incorrect attribution.
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Schizophrenia is more likely to produce godspouse-like claims than BSA, but BSA is a lot more common.
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I’m going to make some general points, and hope they already been covered.
It seems to me that the people who hate “special snowflakes” are attempting to resist a (perceived?) cognitive and empathic load that people with very highly unusual orientations might impose, or are imposing.
Is it worth discussing how high the load actually is, and how it could be lowered either by the people with unusual orientations and/or by the people who don’t want the load without imposing an excessive cost?
Meanwhile, I’m wondering if I’m being too hard on people by pushing to have my name pronounced correctly. (It’s pronounced exactly as it’s spelled, but there are slightly different names which are much more common. As a result, a great many people can’t see or hear it accurately.)
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nænsi lɛboʊvɪtz? (IPA)
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IMHO, ’tis spelled like it should be ‘bŏv’, not ‘boʊ’
(I’m not experienced with IPA)
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I’m surprised that there doesn’t seem to be an IPA-to-speech translator online. When apparently simple things like that aren’t available, I really wonder whether the singularity is all that close.
In any case, I’ll check the IPA version by hand.
I can’t find the symbol InferentialDistance used for the e– this chart uses an e for “met, bed”, and that’s the sound I mean.
The “o” is pronounced as in “go, home”, and in this case, I’ve got InferentialDistance’s symbol on my handy chart, but not Lambert’s o with a line over it.
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I used https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:IPA_for_English
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Thanks– it looks to me as though the two versions work out to the same sounds.
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