Rachel, thank you for the valuable feedback.
I would love to continue this discussion to move beyond superficial interpretations and miscommunications and find the deeper agreement we all seem to share based on what has been written so far. But I realized after a few emails that there was nothing further I could do to move towards that, for many of the reasons you point out below, and felt the best I could do was disengage from the topic and attend elsewhere.
So I will take this opportunity you have graciously given me to say:
Netdiva, and others offended, I apologize for having offended. I wrote the remark as a biting critique of racism, describing a way racism originates in the insecurities of the racist. I replied originally as I did because the nature of the objection was not at all clear to me, and I would not have replied so knowing what I know now. I would welcome hearing the details of how you interpreted my remark and why, or anything else relevant about it, so that I can communicate my intentions better in the future, if you would be willing to share, in this or any other forum or medium. Having a community where we all can effectively communicate is very important to me and I welcome your help in improving in effective communication.
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
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