Been in the Storm So Long, a narrative (largely oral history) about the aftermath of slavery in the United States, has a section about attitudes toward work post-emancipation.
Much of the text gives the rhetoric of white Northerners who were convinced that blacks would not work hard when given the usual incentives, and spent quite a bit of time preaching to them the ennobling effect of hard work on the character of the worker. (Many of these had a great deal of interest in maintaining the labor force for cash crops such as cotton…)
But it also mentions the attitudes expressed by southern whites, many of whom were incensed at the fact that they would now have to do menial labor “like a n----r” (or even just dress themselves and cook their own meal) and complaining about what a dreadful and degraded state they were in as a consequence.
So, yeah, perhaps that message got through loud and clear…
I like that I saw that crap on a place I moderate and was able to just force it to stop. Guy even apologized when he realized he might get banned, and we had a friendly conversation later. (Unlike the kid who wanted to post memes with the n-word and then harassed my friends for being “ugly”.)
Of course, he’s young, admits he doesn’t know things, and was willing to listen.
Meanwhile over in the “Religion, Transphobia and Category Errors” thread, DemonTree is once again shitting up the place:
Suddenly she’s pretending that the same sort of toxic fearmongering transphobia she’s been pushing for years is bad, but mainstream feminism is exactly the same. And the only reason anyone would disagree is because of how “intersectionally disadvantaged” trans people are to cis women.
I mean, we’ve already firmly established that she’s a lying morally bankrupt bigot but this is a whole new level of toxic bullshit.
The problem isn’t the terminology. The problem is the implication that my statement that “mainstream feminism” was not remotely the same as transphobic idiocy was based on how far removed from my personal experience each group was rather than being based on reality and on the fact that DT is a lying sack of shit.
She appears to now be making the argument that everyone is oppressed and therefore we shouldn’t treat trans people as being of especial concern when they are subject to the types of oppression that DT has been justifying for years and is now pretending to oppose.
I’m gonna post in ATMB about this, but accusing someone of gaslighting you is an accusing of a specific kind of nasty lying. It’s wholly inappropriate for GD.
But it’s appropriate here, which is why I’m responding here. I don’t consider you an honest poster. I don’t think you’re aware of your dishonesty; I think you lie to yourself best of all; but your posts here show a remarkable lack of dedication to honesty. So your condescending criticisms of me don’t really land.
If you want a constructive conversation, instead of telling me to start by pointing out how broad a brush you’re using, you should start by using a less broad brush yourself. It’s fucking bonkers to suggest otherwise.
I’ve had a ton of disagreements with Demon Tree - we have some very heated PM chains going back literally years where we bitterly argue over things like misgendering. I’m certain that in some of those older PMs, I accuse her of being a bad faith poster as well.
After all this time, though, I still disagree with DemonTree on a bunch of stuff, but I really don’t think she’s a bad faith poster anymore. I don’t think your post is fair.
Then again, I think you’ve said you don’t think I’m a good faith poster either, so I doubt you give much weight to my opinion.
I’ve seen you vacillate pretty heavily between being thoughtful and considerate, and being balls-out terrible, and I’m never exactly sure which version I’m gonna get. In this case? I think you’re posting honestly, and I get what you’re saying.
But I disagree about Demontree. She’s moderated somewhat, but her tendency toward accusing others of gaslighting when they disagree, of telling others how they should respond to her terrible arguments, and of refusing to acknowledge errors in her own posts make me disinclined to consider her a poster with integrity.
What she said, and I totally agree with this, is that when the dynamic we’ve all been discussing in the linked thread was first brought up, the immediate response from quote a number of sources was, as she said, blanket denials that this phenomenon exists, and suggestions that her belief that it does is right wing paranoia.
That situation - you describe something that you can clearly see and you’re told “it doesn’t exist” - feels like gaslighting.
Now, you’re one of the people who initially reacted with hostility to the idea of the “oppression pyramid”, but have offered some more nuanced takes about the dynamic from the intersectionality thread. But you’ve explained that from your perspective (if I understand it correctly, and you can correct me if not), the original descriptions of a pyramid were hyperbolic to the point that you didn’t even recognize the dynamic we were describing; to you, it is us who have changed our point in the Intersectionality thread.
So maybe it’s not so much that you were intentionally denying the thing we clearly saw existed; it’s that both of our sides didn’t clearly understand the claim the other side was making.
I can accept that there is a good faith explanation for our impasse at that time, but yes, it did feel like being gaslit feels. For many people, who don’t end up having a longer conversation about it and coming to a clearer understanding, that gaslit feeling may be all they experience after their interaction with the other side.
She said it felt like “being gaslit.” Well, when you’re gaslit, someone’s doing the gaslighting. You don’t get gaslit by the laws of physics, and you don’t get gaslit by Mother Nature, and you don’t get gaslit by the Mississippi River. It’s a human who’s doing it.
Which human? Her comment about “blanket denials” was made in response to a quote from me, who had denied her initial broad-brush comment. A little bit of Occams’ Razor gives me a pretty good idea of who she felt was gaslighting her.
The clever use of the passive voice allowed her to avoid directly saying so, but it also gives me further reason to consider her a dishonest poster, and not be interested in engaging with her in a forum where I can’t say that.
Or, it’s what I explained in the rest of my rather lengthy post:
I can also say that the discussion that brought all this up, in the initial thread and in my Pit thread, FELT LIKE gaslighting. I was pointing out a phenomenon that, in my opinion (and based on the latter thread, you agree) clearly exists, in what I felt were clear terms (based on the latter thread, you disagree with this) and I was met with a level of skepticism that seemed entirely unwarranted for the claim I was making. That’s exactly what gaslighting feels like.
I continued to feel that way until ThingFish started engaging with the substance of what I was saying in the Pit thread, and then other people piggybacked onto that conversation.
Afterwards, we continued talking, and it turned out to be a definitional issue. You agree that the phenomenon exists, you just don’t think the term “Pyramid of Oppression” properly evokes it. Fine; I can accept that, and try to be better about defining what I mean when situations like this arise in the future.
Likewise, can you understand why from my perspective, the denials that this phenomenon existed (before I understood it was a miscommunication issue) felt like gaslighting?
FWIW reading the thread in real time I felt she was talking about her reaction to the thread consensus as a whole, not just the particular post she was responding to. I didn’t feel like she was insulting you personally.
I think your opinion of her is overly colored by your disagreement with her. I also came into my original conversations with her with that kind of attitude, and like I said, many of those conversations got heated. But I have seen her honestly take in my points and adjust her views over time based on new information. I don’t think she’s bad faith.
As you and I have clashed heads, I’ve had some of the same feelings towards you. There are times when someone takes a position that you cannot understand, and intrinsically, it feels like they must be doing so in bad faith, because how else could they come to a different conclusion? I think that’s only human. But having felt that way about various people at various times, I think it’s not something to rely on. It’s good to routinely question all assumptions.
This feels like the right time to mention this one. My post:
Her reply:
I think the phrases ‘corrupt sector’ and ‘screw loose’ have very different connotations.
‘Corrupt sector --’ at least as I used it – implies cognitive biases and errors that tend to result in flawed and illogical processing of valid information; a powerful filter that tends to distort and result in erroneous conclusions.
'Screw loose," to me, is far more an accusation of a frank psychiatric disorder – not at all what I meant.
Sometimes, it isn’t the hive mind piling on a poster who holds minority opinions, but a poster’s predisposition toward victimhood that we see.
There are definitely times when this is the case. However, this scenario - where you only said she had a corrupted drive, not a screw loose - is hardly one of those.
Wait @Babale, this is DemonTree the one we are talking about here? I don’t think she “adjust her views over time based on new information.”
What I did see there was very bad faith coming from Demonstree. and it is worse when one notices that she did not come back to explain why she did that.
Just speaking from an IT perspective, while saying a “corrupted sector” might be meant to only imply that there is a part of a person’s brain/personality that has trouble accepting and/or retaining certain kinds of information (due to bias), it can also indicate a mechanical problem with the hard drive itself. Which is like saying there is something wrong with a person’s brain.
I’m just saying, it’s probably not the best metaphor to use when you’re not trying to be offensive, even when the other person has the technical knowledge to even get the reference.
Yes, that is how I interpreted it. After I tried to assume it was merely a misunderstanding and replied in good faith to him, he insults me by saying my brain is broken.
And of course there is something wrong with my brain, since I’m autistic. But regardless, ‘you disagree with me because there’s something wrong with your brain/thoughts/perceptions’ is a non-argument that renders further discussion pointless.
