Re: [sudo-discuss] cuddling it

it is really sad that this list is literally turning into a game of oppression bingo. i will make this brief. 1. using terms like "civilization" to refer to a class of dominant majority with a huge history of colonialistic oppression, at the expense of any class who has experiences colonialistic oppression is pretty offensive. if you want to qualify this as "what they wrongly refer to themselves as" then use quotes and indicate as such. ie "Doesn't the so-self-called 'civilized' psyche secretly crave the things it sets itself apart from and gives up and projects on its image of the noble savage though?" it would be better however to reword this overall to say something like "Doesn't the privileged majority psyche secretly crave the things it sets itself apart from and gives up and projects on its image of the oppressed culture though?" 2. using tropes like "noble savage" is ok as long as everyone involves understand that you are referring to the named trope and not using that term as an offensive term. this can be solved by referencing the trope at hand. ie http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Noble_savage 3. some people are still going to be offended by this term, because it is still hugely offensive to native peoples even as it is used as a handy moniker to call out offensive behavior by the privileged majority. 4. using the term noble savage in reference to african americans is doubly offensive, even if it fits the point you are trying to make fyi. if you MUST use tropes to refer to POC, make sure you are using the correct one that examines the colonial aspects of the behavior being discussed. 5. when someone is offended by your choice in language, the correct thing to do is not double down and try to explain that you weren't being offensive. the correct thing to do is to say something like "i am sorry my language choice offended you. what i was trying to say was___". do not attempt to use dictionary.com <http://dictionary.com>, etymology, wikipedia usage, etc to try and prove that you weren't being offensive. offense is not in the eye of the person who offended, it is in the eye of that person offended. so just accept that you behaved offensively even as you did not intend to and move on. trying to explain to the world at large how you totally weren't offensive citing media to try and "prove" it just makes you more offensive, and it is incredibly disrespectful to the person you are communicating with who likely doesn't give a shit what you were actually trying to say at this point, and did not sign on for a weeks long multiple page scroll email battle/war of attention attrition. accept, move on. don't become a cliche. 6. free speech is not a get out of jail free card. you have the right to say anything you want. and we all have the right to think of you as an asshole for saying it. if someone says "don't say that" they aren't depriving you of your right to free speech, they are trying to save you from losing friends and allies in your community. "congress shall make no law abridging free speech." there is nothing in there that says someone HAS to remain your friend after you were unintentionally a racist asshole. 7. most people who fight oppression in their communities do not want to argue about it in their hobbies. respect that. just because you have the time and inclination to have a long-winded email argument does not mean that you are not also being totally offensive by assuming the other person wants/needs/is going to engage in it. often times i see people "win" arguments on email lists only because they were the more persistant asshole, not because they are right. and be aware that that is totally obvious to people not involved but still reading. 8. a point to everyone: native american peoples are not dead. there are still many thriving native cultures, and people need to understand that when they refer to native things or topics they are talking not just about past people that were wiped out, but also active real working native peoples still here. the bay area is full of native people who are active in their tribal affiliations, who work to promote native rights, and who are invested in the topics of native americans. when you frame out things like that there is a "civlized" society, and native societies (implying not civilized) many of those people are GOING to be super offended. Like when native people try to call out white people on wearing headdresses as culturally appropriative, and white people rebut with "YOU ARE ON THE INTERNET. THAT WAS INVENTED BY US MAYBE YOU SHOULDN'T USE THAT". fucked up. (for the ignorant: native people are americans as well and have equal rights to share in american culture as any other american. besides which: last i checked many native peoples have also contributed to the internet, even as there are colonial privileged oppressionistic usages of native culture as well, such as apache.) try to keep that in mind as you use terms that may evoke native americans, at the risk of being seen as a total racist asshole. also everything that rachel said. -hep On Sun, May 5, 2013 at 2:10 PM, Anthony Di Franco &lt;di.franco(a)aya.yale.edu <mailto:di.franco@aya.yale.edu>> 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 &lt;rachelyra(a)gmail.com <mailto: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" &lt;di.franco(a)gmail.com <mailto: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 &lt;netdiva(a)sonic.net <mailto: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 _______________________________________________ sudo-discuss mailing list sudo-discuss(a)lists.sudoroom.org <mailto:sudo-discuss@lists.sudoroom.org> http://lists.sudoroom.org/listinfo/sudo-discuss _______________________________________________ sudo-discuss mailing list sudo-discuss(a)lists.sudoroom.org <mailto:sudo-discuss@lists.sudoroom.org> http://lists.sudoroom.org/listinfo/sudo-discuss _______________________________________________ sudo-discuss mailing list sudo-discuss(a)lists.sudoroom.org <mailto:sudo-discuss@lists.sudoroom.org> http://lists.sudoroom.org/listinfo/sudo-discuss _______________________________________________ sudo-discuss mailing list sudo-discuss(a)lists.sudoroom.org <mailto:sudo-discuss@lists.sudoroom.org> http://lists.sudoroom.org/listinfo/sudo-discuss -- hep hepic photography || www.hepic.net <http://www.hepic.net> dis(a)gruntle.org <mailto:dis@gruntle.org> || 415 867 9472 _______________________________________________ sudo-discuss mailing list sudo-discuss(a)lists.sudoroom.org http://lists.sudoroom.org/listinfo/sudo-discuss