Sharpen Your Tools
Oct. 19th, 2022 09:41 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rynlingWatching the “you will excel at what you measure” trap
https://derinthescarletpescatarian.tumblr.com/post/697439662041677824/derinthescarletpescatarian-watching-the-you-will
I’d rather be called a tranny bitch by someone who votes in support of my healthcare than the most polite and up-to-date language by someone who votes against it. I’d rather know about risk factors that make someone more likely to be an abuser or rapist than shy away from such things because I don’t want to risk thinking of them as anything other than an Unknowable Evil. I don’t fucking care what Problematic ™ views someone holds about a cartoon and I don’t care who’s the Most Pure or the Most Oppressed or who used to say slurs online when they were fifteen if they’re behaving appropriately now. None of that fucking matters, and it’s not justification for harassing or hurting people.
This is the closing paragraph of a long essay that makes a number of excellent points. The strong language in this passage doesn't reflect the urbane tone of the majority of the essay, but it's a good summary of the author's main argument. I'm actually planning on reading this multiple times until I have the whole thing memorized.
I keep thinking about why a grad student writing a thesis on Disability Studies decided that it was acceptable to call me an "autistic freakshow" on Twitter while using their legal name. This essay summarizes the issue quite nicely.
Essentially, social media culture has created two blunt categories of Abuser/Oppressor and Victim/Oppressed, with the latter being able to do no wrong while the former is completely open to attack. As long as you can prove that you or someone else occupies one of these categories, you're free to behave as viciously as you like without fear of reprisal or concern for what responsibility you might bear for doing so.
The problem is that the justifications used to create these binary categories do very little save to reinforce the supposed validity of the categories themselves. When these categories are so reified as to become a discrete ontology (meaning that they exist with no relation to outside context), they no longer measure any real worth pertaining to social equity or justice.
When overemphasized to such a high degree, these measurements ultimately end up becoming absurd. In the current environment of social media discourse, people who stand up to challenge an unequal or discriminatory status quo face the danger of being labeled as Abuser/Oppressor precisely because of the disruption they seek to cause. Which is fucking wild.
https://derinthescarletpescatarian.tumblr.com/post/697439662041677824/derinthescarletpescatarian-watching-the-you-will
I’d rather be called a tranny bitch by someone who votes in support of my healthcare than the most polite and up-to-date language by someone who votes against it. I’d rather know about risk factors that make someone more likely to be an abuser or rapist than shy away from such things because I don’t want to risk thinking of them as anything other than an Unknowable Evil. I don’t fucking care what Problematic ™ views someone holds about a cartoon and I don’t care who’s the Most Pure or the Most Oppressed or who used to say slurs online when they were fifteen if they’re behaving appropriately now. None of that fucking matters, and it’s not justification for harassing or hurting people.
This is the closing paragraph of a long essay that makes a number of excellent points. The strong language in this passage doesn't reflect the urbane tone of the majority of the essay, but it's a good summary of the author's main argument. I'm actually planning on reading this multiple times until I have the whole thing memorized.
I keep thinking about why a grad student writing a thesis on Disability Studies decided that it was acceptable to call me an "autistic freakshow" on Twitter while using their legal name. This essay summarizes the issue quite nicely.
Essentially, social media culture has created two blunt categories of Abuser/Oppressor and Victim/Oppressed, with the latter being able to do no wrong while the former is completely open to attack. As long as you can prove that you or someone else occupies one of these categories, you're free to behave as viciously as you like without fear of reprisal or concern for what responsibility you might bear for doing so.
The problem is that the justifications used to create these binary categories do very little save to reinforce the supposed validity of the categories themselves. When these categories are so reified as to become a discrete ontology (meaning that they exist with no relation to outside context), they no longer measure any real worth pertaining to social equity or justice.
When overemphasized to such a high degree, these measurements ultimately end up becoming absurd. In the current environment of social media discourse, people who stand up to challenge an unequal or discriminatory status quo face the danger of being labeled as Abuser/Oppressor precisely because of the disruption they seek to cause. Which is fucking wild.
