Anthony & Yo's-

Anthony's statement, taken on its own and not associated with specific personal arguements, is one of the most well-reasoned statements against authoritarianism I've run across in a long time. 

All the more so because it challenges the "soft" or "social" authoritarianism, the dynamics that aren't mediated by law or overt force, but are usually mediated by custom and tradition.  "Children should be seen and not heard," and "People should respond to feedback only by silently assenting," are the same types of dynamics, and to my mind each ultimately translates to "Because I say so" and thence to "Because I can," the latter implying, "Because I can impose my will upon yours (or at least attempt to do so)."

There's a lot of anarchist politics going around in SR, but anarchist ideology is meaningless unless lived in accord with the anarchist spirit of anti-authoritarianism.  That entails the attitude of "no-harm," where one not only doesn't seek to dominate, but where one doesn't even live in a world defined by by attack and defense, competition and domination, etc. 

Much of the activity in the mainstream political and economic world, and the culture at-large, is based on competition for power.  Our culture is thoroughly saturated with competition to the point where it has become pathological: almost but not quite to the point where Thanksgiving dinners would be "competitive events," where Grandma corners the market in turkey, Grandpa corners the market in stuffing, the kids fight over market share of condiments, and then everyone negotiates for their dinner (hopefully before it all gets cold and goes stale).

One of the most radical acts of all is to build a new culture, and at its root that's a culture of voluntary cooperation, informed consent, and good will.  Part of this entails catching & critiquing the unintended instances where each of us occasionally says or does something that's embedded in the control-matrix of the culture we're trying to replace.  Another part entails cutting people some slack from time to time, and assuming they aren't out to do harm.  Anti-authoritarianism begins at home.

-G.


======



On 13-05-05-Sun 2:10 PM, Anthony Di Franco wrote:
Rachel, I've had a bit more time to reflect on what you wrote, and while I don't have anything to add about the immediate question beyond what I said yesterday, I'd like to talk about some of the broader context you brought up in your reply and the more general issues involved.

The first thing is that I am primarily viewing what we are trying to do as having a discussion, so it seems to me that when there are misunderstandings that is exactly when we should be having more discussion to clarify what we are trying to say and find out effective ways to say it, not less. Meanwhile, you are using the terms of some sort of power struggle where I am being attacked and defending myself and allegiances are forming and shifting around the patterns of conflict. I do not see a power struggle but rather a community trying to communicate and communication depends on shared understanding among senders and recipients of symbols and how to use them to convey meaning. Where this is not immediately clear, clarifying it explicitly seems the most direct way to move towards better mutual understanding. I hope this can be reconciled with your own views and I welcome further discussion on this.

Within the attacking and defending point of view, I am also uncomfortable with some things. To speak of attacking and defending and also then to say that the subject of the attack should *stop defending* reminds me too much of the revolting cries of "stop resisting" from police - I could certainly never meditate on such an ugly phrase and I find the suggestion grotesque. It's something I've heard while authoritarian thugs victimize people who are not resisting but only perhaps trying to maintain their safety and dignity under an uninvited attack, perhaps not even that, and one way the phrase is used is as a disingenuous way of framing the situation so that later, biased interpretations of what happened will have something to latch onto. I am glad we have much less at stake in our interactions here than in those situations but I still really don't like to see us internalizing that logic in how we handle communications in our group.

There is another aspect of this I am uncomfortable with, which is the idea that people should respond to feedback only by silently assenting. This reminds me too much of other situations where people, sometimes myself, were supposed to be seen and not heard, and it deprives people of agency over and responsibility for what they do by expecting them to let others determine their behavior unilaterally. I am happy to take feedback and, generally, I hope you can trust people to act on feedback appropriately rather than trying to short-circuit their agency. The more informative feedback is, then, the better, and it should contain information people can use themselves to evaluate what they are doing the way others do so they can figure out how to accommodate everyone's needs. When feedback consist simply of naked statements it is too much like trolling in the small or gaslighting in the large, and especially then, amounts to an insidious way to deprive people of agency by conditioning them to fear unpredictable pain when they exercise agency, and has a chilling effect. In general, the idea that certain people are less able than others to handle the responsibilities of being human, and so they should have their behaviors dictated to them unilaterally by others, is a key to justifying many regimes of oppression, especially modern ones, and because of that I am very uncomfortable when I see any example of that logic being internalized in our group dynamics.

I don't know what passed between you and Eddan involving trump cards but if the card game analogy really is apt then it may be a sign of trivializing the question of safe space by saying that certain people's concerns trump other people's concerns, based not on the concerns themselves, but only on who is raising the concerns. Both are important. I have heard some justifications for 'trumping' as I understand it that remind me of the debate around the Oscar Grant case. There, defenders of Mehserle's conduct claimed that police should be the judges of what legitimate police use of force is because they have special training and experience that give them a uniquely relevant perspective on what violence is justified and what demands of compliance they can legitimately make of people. Another justification I heard was that police are especially vulnerable due to the danger inherent in their duties and so things should be biased heavily towards a presumption of legitimacy when they use violence or demand compliance. To me both these justifications seem problematic because they create a class that can coerce others without accountability and can unilaterally force standards of conduct on others. I am happy that there is much less at stake among us here than there is in cases of police brutality or Oscar Grant's case, and that there is no comparison other than this logic being used. But the logic that certain people's perspectives are uniquely relevant, or that their vulnerability gives them license to force things upon others unilaterally, is still a logic I don't think we should internalize among ourselves, because it produces unaccountable authoritarianism that can be exploited for unintended ends, and does not help with the ostensibly intended ones anyway. It results in us 'policing' ourselves in a way much too much like the way the cities are policed to the detriment of many people and of values we share.

Finally, you mentioned the evening at Marina's apartment and I want to clarify my experience of what happened there. My 'aha' moment didn't have anything to do with the point you were trying to make - I can't even remember exactly what that point was, because it is so strongly overshadowed by my memory of how you treated me. You called me out for something that had passed between you and me in the middle of a social gathering among a mix of friends and strangers, none of whom were involved, which immediately put me in a very uncomfortable situation. Then, you dismissed my attempts to defer speaking to a more appropriate setting, and to open up a dialog with you where I shared my perspective. The only way out you gave me was to assent without comment to you. My 'aha' moment was when I realized that things between us had degenerated to that point; it was when I realized I was mistaken in trying to have a discussion because we were interacting like two territorial animals, or like a police interrogator and a suspect, and you were simply demanding a display of submission or contrition from me before you would let me slink off. While it felt degrading, I took the way out you offered to spare myself and the others in the room the experience of things continuing. I take the risk of sharing this openly with you now because I think we know each other much better than we did then and we would never again end up interacting like potentially hostile strangers passing in the night, or worse. I think we can and should and have been doing better, and overall it's best not to let a mistaken assumption about what I was thinking and how I felt influence an important discussion about how we treat one another in our community.

I, like you, hope you can appreciate that I am taking the time to write this admittedly long-winded reply, not to suck the air out of the room, whatever that means, but to contribute to a discussion that moves us towards a better shared understanding of how to respect our shared values and towards more appreciation of one another's perspectives.

Anthony


On Sat, May 4, 2013 at 10:14 AM, rachel lyra hospodar <rachelyra@gmail.com> wrote:

I am really sad about this whole thread.

Anthony, I think I know you well enough to say that your intent here was not to be offensive, but unfortunately... Here we are. I am responding to the specific message below because it is the one that made me want to unsubscribe from this mailing list and unassociate myself from this group. Everything that came after, gah.

Anti-oppression for the priveleged class, ie not being an unintentional giant jerkface: if someone points out that you are offending or harming them, they are not seeking an explanation, but a change in behavior.  Perhaps an apology or acknowledgement, even a query. If someone says 'i think your POV is fucked up and harmful' please do not go on to elaborate on your POV to them. Even if you think they don't get your amazing nuances. Your amazing nuances are not always important, and part of 'oppression' is that some peoples' nuances are always shoved in other people's faces. Sometimes being a friend means keeping your opinion to your damn self.

This relates to something that eddan has on occasion termed 'the trump card'.  We are all individuals, and as such we ultimately need to keep our own house in order. The trump card concept relates to safe spaces - as safe as eddan might feel in a space, I'm not going to average it together with my safety levels to achieve some sort of average safety rating. My safety reading of a space will always, for me, trump eddan's, and while I am happy if he feels safe it doesn't really matter to my safety level.

The interesting thing about telling most people they are making you feel unsafe, or that they are offending you, is that for some reason their response is almost never 'gosh, whoops!'. It's more usually like what happened here - a bunch of longwinded explanation that completely misses the point, and then a perceived ally of the offender jumping in, also talking a lot, and sucking all the air out of the room.  People always have reasoning for why they did what they did. Requiring offended folks to read about your reasoning for why you said what you said misses the point, and to me makes this conversation read like you don't care if you were offensive.

It's deja vu to me that you are giving all this definition and explanation around the terms you used. It seems identical to our debate around the use of 'constable' and it is sad to me to see you take refuge in the same pattern of defense. It doesn't matter about the etymological history of a phrase. It doesn't. As fun as you may find it to think about, the way things are *heard*, by others, NOW, is a trump card for many.

Anthony, I hope you can understand that I have taken the time out of my life to write this message in the hopes of helping you to modulate your behavior to be less offensive. I am sure you remember the first time I engaged with you on this topic, at Marina's house. Perhaps you'll remember the aha moment when you *stopped defending* and simply accepted the input, thanking me. Perhaps you'll find in that a sort of meditative place of return.

Good luck to you all. I enjoy many things about sudo community and am sure I will stay connected in many ways.

R.
On May 3, 2013 3:05 PM, "Anthony Di Franco" <di.franco@gmail.com> wrote:
Doesn't the civilized psyche secretly crave the things it sets itself apart from and gives up and projects on its image of the noble savage though?

Your description seems more like meditatively flowing through it.


On Fri, May 3, 2013 at 2:58 PM, netdiva <netdiva@sonic.net> wrote:
Here I was thinking "killing it" was just another example of appropriation of african american vernacular by the mainstream.




On 5/3/2013 2:46 PM, Leonid Kozhukh wrote:
"killing it" is a recently popular term to denote excellence and immense progress. it has a violent, forceful connotation.

friends in the circus community - through empirical evidence - have established a belief that operating at the highest levels of talent requires mindfulness, awareness, and calm. thus, a better term, which they have started to playfully use, is "cuddling it."

thought sudoers would appreciate this.

cuddling it,

--
len

founder, ligertail
http://ligertail.com


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