Fumes in abstract spaces

I.

@avibrar00#stitch with @@blackerTheberry Reupload hoping Tiktok understands satire better this time #fyp #viral #xyzbca #jokes #satire #tiktokspareme

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There are groups about whom it doesn’t make sense to say this and groups it does. Men. Nazis. I’m not saying these are perfectly comparable; they both do get relatively murderous in big groups. Individually, too. It’s a shame.

“So you can just say men are trash now but ‘women are trash’ is unacceptable? This is crazy! We live in upside-down topsy-turvy world!!!!!”

Pretend you’ve awoken in a lab where a guy in a white coat is suggesting you walk into a room with ten dogs. He assures you that only one dog out of the ten has rabies and a habit of violent outbursts toward humans, so it’s safe. He starts trying to usher you in. You would have questions.

II.

“But don’t some marginalized groups commit violence at significantly higher rates, too?” The mental and emotional places that human-to-human harm comes from — these matter. People in privileged positions more often harm because they can and it’s fun for them; people who harm in ghettos and favelas, who harm in circumstances rife with physical abuse or sexual assault, do so for different, more self-protective reasons.

It’s not that people are dogs in a lab; it’s that there are differences, real differences, in the probabilities of harm coming to you from different groups, and real differences in where this risk comes from, its causes, its motivations.

These differences are easily misunderstood and ignored in the age of misinformation.

III.

It’s not that different groups of humans are fundamentally different in any intrinsic, essentialist way, or that fundamentally, from birth, some are more worthy of care, protection, and not being called trash. That’s what conservatives believe.

Not all of these groups have equal grievances, equal histories, equal methods of dealing with both. Not all groups have been fighting their grievances from the same footing.

To pretend such longstanding historical differences don’t matter is clown world. Fully online debates are often as clownish as it gets. People stop seeing full people and see avatars; they stop seeing history and see headlines. The playing field feels artificially leveled; it’s not a field anymore, but an online box so sterile that it‘s toxic.

IV.

The world is upside-down and topsy-turvy and “women calling men trash” is not why. It’s an online environment that freely replays existing power structures instead of “disrupting” them as advertised. Privileged classes use the Internet to continue shielding themselves from scrutiny, in an unbroken historical tradition. Writers like Steven Pinker and Yuval Noah Harari sweep vast historical facts under the rug, writing ahistorical fanfiction under the guise of clever contrarianism.

These “anti-woke" intellectuals get their knickers in a twist trying to redirect our attention toward petty online feuds and away from material causes, facts of history, anything real that reminds the privileged why they started with a leg up.

V.

Consumers of such opinions are often untrained in the art of “dealing with icky feelings.” They instead choose to prop up the market for news that’s coy, revisionist, and lying by omission; they are rarely if ever burdened by knowing the actual proportions of, say, women who use violence and meanness to beat back assault, or colonized people doing the same to uninvited colonizers. They can glide over the reasons such people would have to fight back in the first place. They can ignore how these differ from the reasons that white American Christians might feel justified in, say, supporting anti-trans legislation.

Not all people are exactly as dangerous as that room of dogs. Not every “out-group” has equal cause to be feared, avoided, or infantilized as every other one. People need to update their stereotypes of who and where and what is dangerous as facts change. People in the late capitalist patriarchal West cannot remain blind to the dangers in their own culture, the insidious spiritual rot that comes from chugging the Kool-Aid and unapologetic propaganda of ‘Murrica.

VI.

Rather than “men are trash” being part of some indoctrinating worldview, it’s an accurate reflection and approximation (more so than “women are trash” at least) of the facts of history.

Normal people know, furthermore, that there are multiple intersecting instances of systemic oppression that can factor into an individual person’s life. Conservatives and neoliberals want to declare everyone bankrupt and pretend these don’t exist, or they even out; normal people are tired of having to relitigate the truth, i.e. that they do exist, and don’t “even out.” Some people have some things harder than others through no fault of their own. If we want anything remotely resembling an actual meritocracy, we all have to acknowledge this; we can’t let 30% of the population bury their heads in the sand about it.

VII.

To belabor the point so I can’t be mistaken: when people show drastically different responses to the phrase “men are trash” versus “women are trash,” it’s not bigoted.

Thinking the phrase “men are trash” is a serious problem is operating within a very silly frame. It’s an abstract and made-up one where no injustice has ever happened and men are being discriminated against from scratch. That is not the real world. We live in the real world.

Not all groups behave dangerously in the same proportions or for the same reasons. Men are disproportionately more violent than women. Cops disproportionately commit more domestic abuse (and on-the-job abuse) than other professions.

VIII.

There are many of us who don’t want to live in a universe of “alternative facts,” where these things are denied; there are many of us who instead sincerely want to find out together what the facts actually say and what actions they suggest. I’m hoping people who’d like to ignore this, who have been ignoring this for years, are beginning to wake up and smell the coffee.

This is highly optimistic. The facts clearly continue to rankle people, as opposition to a certain politician’s arrest shows. Some continue to flock to worlds where it’s socially acceptable for them to believe alternative ones, and where being entertained by all the different views, rather than ever doing anything about them, is a tenable strategy. But we’re not birds. We shouldn’t be doing that. We should be thinking for ourselves and helping others do the same.