Comment by nvahalik
5 years ago
It's disappointing that, while they name DJT and the "radical right", they don't explicitly call out the "radical left" (it's assumed within the article, but it would be nice to call it out).
One of my favorite internet apologists has a saying that people who don't have good arguments have to resort to bad tactics, and for many people that I've had conversations with (especially among the left, but also among the right) this has often been very, very true.
While I don't support BLM/M4BL (the hashtag, not the sentence), I do think that several valid points have come up. And even though I disagree on their conclusions and sometimes their methods, it has at least caused me to think critically about how I understand the situation and what should be done about it.
I hope that the future can continue to be a place where we don't think of ideas as either "safe" or "unsafe". Any view we come across that challenges us can frighten/scare us away. Maybe it causes us to change our views, maybe it doesn't, but the introspection is valuable. I feel that's what a lot of people who want to silence debate are missing. Perhaps they don't want the introspection. Maybe they just want an echo chamber.
Regardless, let's fight for a world where ideas aren't crimes, and that people are strong/wise enough to debate and engage them in a way that makes everyone better.
> ideas as either "safe" or "unsafe"
"An open mind is like a fortress with its gates left unguarded".
Thing of it is, there ARE safe and unsafe ideas (or, more commonly, safe and unsafe presentation of ideas). And it's critical thinking skills that render you capable of safely handling unsafe ideas / presentations.
You're right that the introspection is valuable, and that encountering "unsafe" ideas should lead to it; so I'm going to suggest: it's a person's attitude towards introspection that realizes the risk posed by an idea.
> who want to silence debate
IMO these people are just very badly communicating the idea "stop talking about other people's lives, and have those people speak instead" (plus layers of baggage and trauma). Halle Berry's recent controversy over a trans role is a good example of this; people talked about how she should't play the role (and some other issues), what they meant was "someone who lived this story should tell this story".
> people are strong/wise enough
Yes. Do you support massively more funding for education? Or do you see something else as a means to fight for this?
> "there ARE safe and unsafe ideas"
A nit to pick: The consequences of ideas can be safe and unsafe. The words "The police are racist" can be questioned, examined, and judged accordingly. The _result_ of the ideas and how you process them are the issue here. Gasoline is perfectly safe if left alone. But thrown in a live fire it will cause major damage.
Discarding ideas simply because others might abuse them isn't the right way to go about this.
> "someone who lived this story should tell this story"
I feel that there is a danger to this argument. It is in the same vein as what I have encountered before: a refusal to hold any sort of meaningful conversation due to an intersectional party who claims that their point is "more valid" because of lived-experience. And they would not allow anyone else to say anything because they were not <insert intersectional crossroads here>.
This promotion, if left unchecked, can mean that the person lives within an echo chamber and can be very unhealthy. They are unwilling to have other people influence them. It can be very detrimental.
> Do you support massively more funding for education?
We homeschool, so I'm not really a proponent of state-run education. However, as a parent just talking to our children and fostering good relationships with everyone around us should be a priority. I'm for the idea that this concept starts within the home and then extends out. Kids mirror what they see at home.
> nit
"What, pray tell, is an outcome? When can the consequences of an action ever be fully accounted for?" (https://strongfemaleprotagonist.com/issue-6/page-112-2/)
> a refusal to hold any sort of meaningful conversation
Hmm. I disagree. This is how you have meaningful conversations; you speak of your own experiences, and you ask people of theirs. I don't see this happen all that often. Mostly I see people, to put it harshly for clarity, dictating to others what those others' lived experiences were. AKA, speak for yourself, not for others. If you find yourself speaking for others, pause, and turn it into a question and ask those others.
I really do mean "this is HOW". As in, if you, the person reading this, does this practice, I would expect you to have a bunch of meaningful conversations where before you might not have. That's how it's worked for me. I'd be interested in hearing experiences to the contrary.
> We homeschool
Do you support maternity/paternity leave, or other societal support for more parents having more capacity to home-school?
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> it would be nice to call it out
I think it's important to consider the primary audience here. If this were a Wikipedia article, a neutral perspective would be important, yes. But this isn't a Wikipedia article. It's a persuasion piece aimed at the members of the left, and writing from the perspective of the left (or at least not from blatantly outside that perspective) makes it more effective.
I agree and would go even farther. This article would be 0% effective if written in a neutral style. When you're trying to reach people stuck in an "us vs them" mentality, you have to identify yourself as "us" before you start criticizing "us". Otherwise the criticism will be seen as identifying yourself as "them" and people will start railing, not against what you're saying, but against all the other arguments associated with "them".
I concur. It's subtle but likely effective given the audience. :)
Can you point to an example of where an idea has become a crime? Specifically, an idea or action that has not already been criminalized? I am not in full support of this, but all I see are people losing their jobs in private companies for at best being stupid and at worst bring harmful to their co-workers and creating a toxic oppressive atmosphere at work.
Lets inspect these ideas that are being deemed unsafe and why they are and then make a judgement.
Every time I dig into this subject it just turns out to be a bunch of a privilaged people bemoaning an inability to keep spouting their ALREADY DISPROVEN ideas like they are some novel creation.
> While I don't support BLM/M4BL, (the hashtag, not the sentence
This is a bullshit take. You either think black people are human and their lives matter. Or you don't. There's no "not the hashtag" -- the hashtag is the literal "black lives matter." The entire point of the political movement is to recognize that black people are people too and that western institutions of power * do not * recognize this truth.
> You either think black people are human and their lives matter.
You are making a false equivalence here. I can (and do) believe that black people are fully human and their lives matter.
I can also agree with certain points of the BLM movement, again, disagreeing with their reasoning, but supporting some the overarching ideas.
> The entire point of the political movement is to recognize that black people are people too
Based upon their website[0], they seem to have a much broader idea of "what matters" that goes far beyond "black people are people to" that will, undoubtedly, cause many people to shy away from the hashtag (but not the sentence).
[0]: https://blacklivesmatter.com/what-matters-2020/
Again, I think the George Floyd's killing, underscores a massive problem that needs to be justified, but you don't have to agree with BLM to want to see that problem solved.
> [...] the hashtag is the literal "black lives matter."
No, it's not, that's exactly the point. Otherwise #WhiteLivesMatter is completely valid too. After all, literally "white lives matter" is true, right?
This is exactly the bad faith argumentation that the GP and TFA are about. "You either support our hashtag or you do not think black people are people too."
> The entire point of the political movement is to recognize that black people are people too and that western institutions of power * do not * recognize this truth.
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Your comments sound a lot like religious zealotry.
Think about what you are suggesting:
"You are a racist if you don't support this particular organization"
Why would your reaction to the phrase "black lives matter," not be one of immediate support if you're not a racist? Do you think that black people's lives don't matter? This isn't a game of semantics or something that's up for "debate" (what is there to debate?): real people are being murdered.
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