see, this is what the democrats, i think, don't understand about politics - what it means to _walk away_.
like, viborg, you've said something which i take to be a pretty offensive personal insult. and, i don't know, under certain versions of european culture the way of handling that would be to "demand satisfaction", to challenge you to a duel. now, don't get me wrong, i am a _big fan_ of dueling. unfortunately, to the best of my knowledge, bayard, you are not a lesbian, and since i cannot use the tip of my rapier to push up your chin when i have you at my mercy, dueling is not a possible solution to our problems.
am i _satisfied_ with our little contretremps? no, not really. it bothers me, viborg, it bothers me that you can say something like that without consequence. that's why i'm not on social media, not even instagram. this is the only place i engage on the public internet, the only place where i make myself vulnerable to people like you saying shit like the shit you said. on the public internet, behavior like yours is considered normal and acceptable, and i don't really consider it either.
i've walked away from this board in the past, in large part due to the tenor of the political discussion here, and i may well do so in the future. am i going to do it _now_, because you falsely called me a "tankie" in a political thread? nah, i don't think i am.
if i did, you know, if i did and said so, people would talk about, i suspect that a lot of people would see it as an overreaction on my part, perhaps even some sort of fragility. seen in isolation from the larger context, yeah, probably it is. and democrats have this tendency to see _everything_ in isolation, to separate things out from their larger context. they divide and divide and subdivide, and this is what makes conquest possible.
it's like porpentine talks about - allostatic load. a lot of liberals who are in positions of relative privilege are ignorant of allostatic load, of the different burdens we all carry. i don't know what burdens you carry, viborg, whether they are heavier or lighter than mine. i only know that they are _not_ the same as mine.
and what happens with allostatic load is that maybe the load at some point becomes too great to bear, and i put it down and walk away. that's what i've done with the democratic party. the democratic party is _institutionally hostile_ to me and my values. the culture it encourages is a culture in which there isn't anything _wrong_ with you calling me a "tankie" because my values are not the same as yours, because i will not "ally" myself with you, meaning subsume my interests to your own.
and we walk away, and you don't concern yourselves with us, with where we go, i mean you are sad, but you hope that one day i will learn, that we will come crawling back, and you, in your benficience, will forgive us for our folly. liberals are so convinced, so doggedly convinced, that we _need_ them, and honestly, i'm inclined to agree, why i am a fool who returneth to my folly. i do think we _need_ liberals, but i also am not sure whether i can _trust_ liberals. whether it is _safe_ for me to trust them. because there's no reciprocal sense of need, on reciprocal sense of _obligation_. we owe them everything, and they owe us nothing. and so right now? right now i don't think it _is_ safe for me to trust a lot of liberals. i don't think it's safe for me to trust the national democratic party.
ilx is a moribund institution, and i do not think this is bad or unnatural or wrong. it is a social organization and it is tied to a particular place in time, a particular generational group of people, and over time the number of us who find a home here are fewer and fewer. when i walk away there is no one to take my place. and some people miss me, and a lot of them, i miss them in return. i've lost a lot of people out of my life because there is nowhere for me to talk to them.
and some people i've known, they become alone and isolated and bitter and i am sad for them, everyone needs to have a place where they feel comfortable, everyone needs to have a place where they belong. i've felt that way in the past, alone, isolated, bitter, and i don't now. and if i leave ilx, there are other places for me, there are places i have had to _make_ in order for there to be a place for me and for others, just like people had to _make_ ilx when usenet started dying.
with the democratic party it is different. people treat it like a social club, sometimes, like the liberal protestant churches, they treat their churches like social clubs, but what is left are people who are suffering, people who have needs, and these places, what power they have, they do not use it. they amuse themselves in their dotage.
those of us who walk away from the democratic party, we try and make new places for ourselves. and we don't have the power or the expertise or the _real estate_ but we try anyway, we meet in each others' houses and we fight and the country club democrats sit and laugh at our naivete, laugh while we struggle, and say "if only they did things our way..."
and maybe when their club falls apart completely, some of them will bring what they know and help us, and maybe we will do things that we couldn't do before. or maybe, you know. maybe putin will come in and a boot will stomp on a human face forever, which has _nothing at all_ to do with orwell's late-in-life pastime of ratting out all his old socialist friends to the secret police.
anyway, that went a little longer than i expected, i gotta go, another hard day of packing, moving day is tomorrow, i wish the landlords had given me the key, would've made it a lot easier, but oh well. got some friends coming over in a bit, it'll be good to see them. it's hard times, but yesterday was a good day. it's good to have friends, good to have people who are there for me when i need them.
― Kate (rushomancy), Sunday, 31 July 2022 15:11 (one year ago) link
So here's a thing. This week I'm basically taking over this thread by the way until I get bored or enough people tell me to shut up and go away.
One of my friends posted a link to a FiveThirtyEight article analyzing the results of a recent poll on Americans' feelings on LGBTQ rights. I don't really read a lot of 538 - I was kind of a junkie for it in 2016, looked for reassurances that Donald Trump would definitely, totally lose from Nate Silver's reasoned analyses, and I kinda re-evaluated my coping strategies when Trump won.
But a friend posted a link to the article and so I needed to read it to figure out how much I should panic. I'm still reasonably disinclined to panic. I mean, any more than I'm already panicking. There's still a fairly significant chance that I might be systemically exterminated within the next five years, after all.
What fascinates me about this article is that it uses a term I hadn't heard before - "cross-pressured". As far as I can tell, this is used to describe a situation where poll results show that one person holds two mutually incompatible beliefs - that they exist in a state of cognitive dissonance. When it comes to trans rights, an _extraordinarily high_ number of people are "cross-pressured".
In this light it makes perfect sense that the Democrats have no coherent platform. They're trying to appeal to the electorate, and the beliefs and desires of much of the electorate are meaningless and nonsensical.
But there is perhaps sort of a vicious circle happening here, in that the incoherence of the Democratic party _legitimizes_ incoherence in the population. People who call themselves "moderates" turn out to, in practice, model severe cognitive dissonance more closely. In other words, the electorate, as well as the Democratic leaders, are fundamentally incapable of coping with empirical reality.
The funny thing is, as a trans person, I don't really see this as a _new_ way of thinking. I think there was _always_ a certain amount of contradiction and incoherence when it came to normative beliefs about trans people. As long as nobody digs too deep, as long as nobody asks too many difficult questions, everything _seems_ to make sense.
But it doesn't. The principles I was raised from birth to live my life by, they don't make sense. They are, in fact, batshit crazy. And people are coming up with more and more ridiculous euphemisms to disguise this increasingly obvious fact. "Cross-pressured" is apparently one of the more recent. I can't wait to see what the wonks think of next.
― Kate (rushomancy), Tuesday, 2 August 2022 02:31 (one year ago) link
three months pass...
two weeks pass...
one month passes...
four months pass...
eight months pass...