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The qualitative differences in my thought processes between ADHD-medicated and unmedicated is:
a) whoa, profound
b) hard for me to remember/believe/recognise when unmedicated.
Today I can tell because I've been reading/thinking about the same stuff since before I took my meds, and I can remember what I was thinking about, trying to put into words earlier, as opposed to now, and... yeah. I'm not sure words can describe the difference in experience between my unmedicated, off-the-charts-how-did-you-get-to-28-before-diagnosis self and my medicated self.
Anyway, on to the topic, in which I pick up Someone Is Wrong On The Internet, in the category of RaceFail '09 Version 2.0, The New Failbatch. (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png) naraht is taking the turn as Archivist of the Revolution this time.)
The thread of derailment I wish to cut today: Man, these people are totally over-reacting on the basis of one sentence in a review!
( Cut for length. )Current Music: This Is Ivy League - A Summer Chill
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(Oh, by the way: Am semi-offline for the weekend.)
In order to avoid getting stuck in Someone Is Wrong On The Internet without having to leave these things unaddressed, which tends to make me feel annoyed and stressed all by itself, I'm going to return to ranting in my own space. Possibly, eventually, on my Very Serious Blog as well, but my Very Serious Blog isn't ready to get off the ground yet, not even close.
So, first up: one of the attempted derail sectors of Dear God Not Again: RaceFail '09 Version 2.0, Fail Harder, which naraht is links-collecting at this point, and which is derived from Patricia Wrede, who I've never heard of, writing a book called The Thirteenth Child which takes, as its premise, a magic-enabled world in which the Americas were uninhabited until the white people got there; the book is reviewed at tor.com, and Lois McMaster Bujold makes an ass of herself in the comments, which is sad, because I had heard of her and had vague intentions to read her books at some point, and now I think she's a jerk and don't want to.
(Apparently my internet habits have changed in the last few months - I didn't hear about RaceFail for months, this has only been a few days, it seems.)
Anyway, in this similar but not directly related discussion on ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif) james_nicoll's LJ, someone suggests the validity (as parallel) of writing (even if German) an alt-history world in which Europe contains no Jews, or possibly the whole world contains no Jews. gohover says: If you're interested In Jewish history, that could be interesting. Either there are Jews elsewhere in the author's world, in which case the author could show the differences Europe made on Jewish culture (and vice versa), or there are no Jews anywhere, in which case you can still show the differences Jews have made in the world. There are lots of non-creepy ways the subject could be handled. And I say oh hell no.
Because that's just too glib. In exactly the same way, to me, that the dismissals of the implications of writing the native populations of the Americas are too glib. If you're going to do that - either one - you can't keep things familiar. You can't do that and just have the Glorious Dramatic European History or the Great American Adventure without the dark, nasty, guilty bits. Because that's not how history works.
America without the native population does not up being America as you see it now. Especially if this is also America without slavery - that does not happen. These are not just unfortunate byproducts of history - they are integral, causative factors of the shape of history as it turned out, of the shape of America. It is intrinsic.
Taking out the Jews is even worse, if that's possible, because if you lose the Jews, you lose all of the Abrahamic religions - they came out of Judaism. If your world does not contain the Jews, your world does not contain Christianity or Islam either, and your world is totally fucking unrecognisable from the world that we live in. The land masses are the same, and maybe east Asia and parts of India aren't that different. Maybe... except you can't know, because you can't know for sure how the world would have been different had Christianity never hit the Roman Empire, had the old faiths persisted.
I'm not saying it's impossible to write speculative fantasy on these premises - what I'm saying is that you can't do it as background. If you write a people out of existence as background, rather than as the setup for an exploration of how the world is different without their influence, then you're almost guaranteed to be doing it for reasons that are entirely offensive.
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Things I've Been Thinking A Lot About Lately, Part One: Derailment and Topical Relevancy. (Part two is Cultural Appreciation, Appropriation, and Inclusion: Every Damn One Of You Is Doing It Wrong.) Related partly to RaceFail and partly to various other things recently.
tl;dr: Just because you have a different problem doesn't mean other people's problems don't exist or don't matter, your problem is not necessarily relevant, and changing the rules so you win no matter what is childish and stupid and wrong.
There's this strong tendency I've noticed for people to want to derail discussions with which they are uncomfortable, or, especially, feel vaguely culpable by association. ( Contains use of the R word. I find it triggering when I'm feeling vulnerable, others might too. )
Similarly, you have people like Will Shetterly, who can't take on any concept that racism is bad, or should be fought, because he's fixated on class prejudice, refusing to accept intersectionality or, it seems sometimes, that racism exists. Other people failing their way through in the RaceFail (which seems to have petered out, if only because people are too wounded, exhausted, and frustrated to keep trying to persuade the wilfully stupid, and anyone who's not wilfully stupid is largely in consensus by now; what's left is a bloody battlefield and the general sense that even if some good things came out of it, no-one really won and the gains weren't worth the pain) were bringing up their experiences with being poor, with being white in an area where white is a minority group, with being the child of an alcoholic, with whatever kind of pain makes them feel like a victim, with the fairly blatant intent of trying to silence people who feel damaged by racism, more-or-less stating outright that talking about racism is wrong and cruel because it's like the eeeevil non-white people and their liberal-guilt-overwhelmed friends don't think that their oh-so-special pain matters.
As you might tell from my increasing editorialising as that paragraph went on, I find this attitude a touch problematic.
I've had this conversation more than once over the last two and a half years, but to analogise: I am in constant pain. Less than I used to be, now, but still constant, and for a couple of years solid, it was constant and severe. I was in more pain than anyone with whom I was in regular contact. I'm probably still in more pain than most, all the time, because I'm still in constant pain and it's still fairly strong. (Remarkably so today, but then I slipped on the stairs and ow.)
This does not mean that people around me cease to feel pain, and it does not mean their pain doesn't matter. If someone I care about gets hurt, even a little, this is a matter of concern to me. I am sympathetic, and if people want me to hug them and kiss it better, I will. In the context of their pain, mine is relevant only so far as it helps me to empathise - and I'm not going to bring that up overtly, because then it sounds like I'm trying to make it All About My Pain. It's relevant to me, only.
However, if I'm having a bad pain day, and it's spiking like it does some time, and I'm biting my thumb to keep from whimpering or screaming and people nearby are trying to help me deal with that, be it fetching ice packs, getting me painkillers, or just holding my hand and being supportive... interrupting this activity is a total dick move. It's a dick move if you're interrupting and blocking the people trying to help because you want to complain about your papercut, and it's a dick move if you have a broken leg that's aching; it's only not a dick move if you've just fallen down the stairs and broken your ankle and you need someone to call for medical help.
Because your pain is just as important as mine, but it's not the issue right now.
And that's what these people don't seem to be able to see - that class prejudice is very real, for example, but it's not necessarily relevant. It intersects with race issues, yes, but outside of the ways in which that is relevant to the discussion at hand, which it often won't be, it's not relevant to a discussion on race. Nobody's saying your issues don't matter, they're just not what people are talking about.
And it's different when you're taking part of a wider discussion than if, say, you're talking to one person, or even a couple of friends. Conversation can drift. I've spent a lot of time discussing RaceFail with my brother-out-law; in the course of those conversations, we talked a lot about personal experience, and the conversation wandered over other topics, tangentially related to but not really what RaceFail was about. That's fine, because it was the two of us talking to each other, and we weren't trying to control anyone else's discourse, and we weren't making a general discussion All About Us; we were talking about what we thought, as friends do. And because we're friends, because we're close on the order of family-like bonds, understanding each other's personal experiences is something that does matter to us, where it wouldn't matter to strangers or acquaintances or even, necessarily, less-close friends.
News flash: Context is relevant to communication. Film at eleven. What's acceptable in some circumstances is inappropriate in others.
Except a lot of the people doing it know that. They'd call it in other people - and have done so. (Although people who'll accuse others of misogyny at the same time as accusing someone of "whoring" don't count as people, for purposes of this discussion, because: lolwhat.) They also know that saying that this discussion is taking place on academic lines when the topic of discussion is, actually, subjective experience and responses and the people who disagree with them just aren't up to communicating on that level is manure of the highest grade; they're just using academia as a tool to silence dissent. Again, they'd call it out if used against them.
Hence, it's deliberate derailment of the conversation (I'm going to be charitable and say it's unconscious, because I like to think the best of people, but I am not giving a pass on deliberate intent). It means - and even though this was recognised, even though people were fighting it, it was frustratingly effective - that a lot of the argument becomes very meta. The argument becomes an argument about the terms under which the argument is being held. When you know you're in the wrong, subvert the paradigm.
That's also what the stuff under the cut tag is about.
I'm all for subverting the dominant paradigm as a tool to fight oppression, but that's the point - it's the dominant paradigm, it deserves it. Done in the way and context that was happening in RaceFail 09, it's not just moving the goal posts for people trying to score a modicum of justice, it's also repainting the field boundaries and switching the rules from soccer to lacrosse. And not giving the other team any sticks.
Jack that noise. The people on the "wrong" side of this know who they are, even if they still think they're right; I'm not saying any of them are racist because of any of the above (although some of them turned out to be horrifyingly racist in other things they said and did). I am, however, saying that they're not good people, because good people don't do this, especially when they know it's hurting people.
And one final note:
"They're not like this in real life!" is sophistry at best; the Internet is real life. The people you're talking to are real people. If you're hurtful, malicious and cruel on the internet, you're hurtful, malicious, and cruel in real life. It's not right to judge people by their behaviour towards people they have a vested interest in pleasing; that's an indication of their desire to be pleasing to that person, for whatever reason. (It's not necessarily a bad reason. Enlightened self-interest is still self-interest despite the enlightenment; if I go out of my way to make my friend happy because it brings me joy to see her smile, this is not automatically me being a selfish bitch.) You can judge people by their behaviour towards strangers, because that shows their character.
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After a conversation with troubleinchina, I'm reading about race riots. (Detroit 67, Los Angeles 92.) I was aware of the Rodney King Riots, as they're called, at the time, but I was eleven years old. So much of what I'm reading is new to me.
The thing that's kind of horrifying is that the victims of violence in these things are generally the innocent, and the individual incidents that triggered both riots really weren't worth it. It seems clear that in both cases it's a matter of tensions rising until something is going to break.
But the thing is, I'm getting choked up by heroism and kindness this morning.
The instances:
In 1743, a woman was convicted of stealing a shoulder of mutton from a Whitechapel butcher. It turned out that her husband was ill, and her children starving, at the time of the theft. The jury returned their guilty verdict in a mumble, to indicate they thought she deserved compassion. The judge replied, "I hear you, gentlemen," and imposed the token fine of one shilling.
Which the jury proceeded to pay.
No age is without kindness.
On the first day of the 1992 Los Angeles riots, a white truck driver, stopped at a traffic light, was dragged from his truck and beaten. News helicopters filmed and broadcast every blow. The police had been ordered to withdraw for their own safety and never came. Reginald Denny was rescued by a black man named Bobby Green, Jr, who was unarmed but nearby and, having seen the broadcast, rushed to the scene and took Denny to hospital in Denny's own heavily-laden truck. Denny recovered after brain surgery. Bobby Green, Jr, is a big damn hero.
Minutes later, Fidel Lopez, a Guatemalan immigrant, was brutally attacked. Reverend Bennie Newton, a black minister who ran an inner-city ministry for troubled youth, physically placed himself between Lopez and his attackers and said that if they wanted to kill Lopez, they'd have to kill him too. He then took Lopez to hospital.
That, too, is real heroism.
I am, literally, crying right now, because human nature never changes, and there is always cruelty and savagery and nobility and kindness and heroism. I honestly believe that so long as the good people keep trying, the bad people can't truly win out; racism is still around, sure, but you can't tell me things aren't better than they were fifty or a hundred years ago.
And there are heroes.
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So, this evening I was reading Keith Windschuttle's article in the current issue of Quadrant: Why Australia Is Not A Racist Country.
And if I were having less success at being amused by it, I'd be absolutely outraged.
His argument is not only that Australia is not racist now (his assertion of a happy, multicultural nation fails to take into account the success of One Nation, such as it was, or the race riots in Cronulla, but then he seems to be very good at selective attentiveness), it never was. While a critical reading of the article by anyone interested will, of course, provide many examples of why he sucks, and unless you care enough to read the article itself you probably won't care for an exhaustive breakdown written by me, there are a couple of particularly good examples I can't resist.
1) He cites as a reason for the non-racist nature of Australia society the fact that... Rudyard Kipling was popular.
Apparently in his world there was no racist content in Kipling.
Note that I think very highly of Kipling, and am a huge fan of such of his work as I have read. However:
But despite his dirty 'ide, 'e was white, clear white, inside...
Nooo, that's not racist. The fact that Gunga Din concludes: "Though I've beated you and flayed you, by the livin' gawd that made you, you're a better man than I am, Gunga Din." does not mean there is no racist content. (I may have the variant spelling and punctuation wrong, I'm quoting from memory.)
2) Where there is clear evidence of popular racist sentiment, he dismisses it; e.g. when referring to the strong concern of the governments dismantling the White Australia Policy that incautiously fast progress on that matter would cause them to lose office by provoking racist outcry by the public, he says that this fear was simply, "in [his] opinion, unwarranted."
Brilliant.
3) "After the early gold rushes, the Chinese were largely excluded by the organised labour movement from the traditional skilled trades, as well as other unionised occupations such as shearing and wharf labouring. Nonetheless, they found their own economic roles. They came to dominate market gardening and eventually had an effective monopoly, growing no less than 75 per cent of the vegetables in the whole country. This led them to become the principal hawkers of vegetables and to control about one fifth of Australia's fruit trade. Chinese also found ready employment in the hospitality industry, especially as cooks. Half the cooks in Australian hotels in the late nineteenth century were Chinese. In the 1880s they dominated the low-cost furniture manufacturing industry, leaving the high-quality end of the market to European tradesmen."
Seriously, to me that reads as an argument in favour of the notion of widespread racism in Australia. Discuss.
4) Windschuttle is a windbag, I suspect a racist, certainly a revisionist (worst of all), and something of an idiot, but he's also a hilarious elitist; more than once in the article he uses the phrase "the lower orders"; what he totally, totally means is, "the lower classes". (But of course, Australia is supposed to be a classless society. The obvious joke about how of course Australians have no class is hereby acknowledged.) Because of course, only shabby proletarians are racist, the intelligentsia could never be so crude.
He's so bourgeois it's wonderful.
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annoyed