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  #21  
Unread 02-18-2021, 04:03 PM
John Riley John Riley is offline
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You Trump guys always deny what you say. It probably comes from a gross lack of self-awareness. If women are more tender and sensitive because they have not been involved in the dirty aspects of life, which is a ridiculous notion not based on any knowledge or appreciation for human history, then the obvious conclusion, although you seem incapable of realizing it, is that women have had the better deal in life. Why should they want to give up being the sensitive seers of our existence? They should continue to let the men go out and kill the game and bring home the money. That way they can preserve such preciousness.

I'm not surprised you're incapable of realizing what you're saying. It's a characteristic of all right-wing types. In that regard, I think you are accurate. You have no sensitivity even to your own words. I guess your life in the tough world of alpha males has ruined your ability to interpret even your own language.
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  #22  
Unread 02-18-2021, 04:36 PM
James Brancheau James Brancheau is offline
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It started a long time ago, John. About the time the middle class started really getting squeezed, which I'd argue started with, or was greatly exaggerated by Reagan, and that ultimately led to Trump. When you're ripping people off, you have to continually distract or just flat out lie. Welcome to Trump, the crescendo (I can only hope).
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  #23  
Unread 02-18-2021, 05:43 PM
Julie Steiner Julie Steiner is offline
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When James posted his "Jesus Christ" comment, my first fleeting thought was John 11:35 ("Jesus wept.")

Some cultures, including that of the historical Jesus, have a much broader range of permissible male emotion than others. It would seem logical that men in those cultures might develop a more nuanced understanding of their own and others' emotions than men raised with more rigid ideals of tough-guy strength and control, in which men and boys lose significant social standing if they cry. And conversely, the women in cultures that inhibit male emotion seem much more emotionally savvy in comparison with the men. How could they not?*

I have a close friend who is an 81-year-old man who doesn't believe in God, but who is nonetheless an enthusiastic member of the men's group at his church, because for the first time in his life he's able to have a conversation about "unmanly" emotions like sadness and anxiety and have his male peers support him and admit to similar feelings, instead of attacking him for showing vulnerability and weakness (which has been his experience for most of his life).

He says that before he found this men's group, anger was pretty much the only negative emotion he had felt allowed to express to other men. In the past, whenever he wanted to share his grief or anxiety or similar with a male friend, he felt obliged to convert those feelings into "manly" anger, or risk rejection and ridicule. Now he finally has the opportunity to come to terms with whatever it is he's really feeling, with the aid of male peers.

BTW, alcohol often serves as an excuse for men in emotionally inhibited cultures to express vulnerabilities like sadness and pain to each other. Afterwards, they can always say: "I wasn't myself, that was the alcohol talking. Alcohol makes a lot of strong guys like me get weepy. My dad and grandpa were the same way...."


* Answer: If they are on the autistic spectrum, like me, and bad at recognizing or predicting others' emotions, especially from facial expressions.

Last edited by Julie Steiner; 02-18-2021 at 05:50 PM.
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  #24  
Unread 02-18-2021, 06:36 PM
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Allen Tice Allen Tice is offline
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Perhaps I am a flake, osmium, so dense light bends around me. However, I dissemble, like Major Molecule down the road. I do hear that little girl upthread.
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  #25  
Unread 02-19-2021, 10:06 AM
Julie Steiner Julie Steiner is offline
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I hear her too, Allen. And I realize that my non-engagement with what just happened in the thread is completely at odds with my admiration for Tienna's message. So I will clumsily try to do better.

The core of Tienna's appeal to her mother is her unshaken belief that her mom really does want to be friends with her dad. I don't kid myself that all the participants at Eratosphere really do want to be friends with each other.

But we do have other shared goals that we could focus on. I would like to think that all of us here, as poets, have a shared desire to understand the truth of the world we live in, experience, and write about.

And I think all of us recognize that our own experience of the world is different from that of others, and that our perception of the truth is limited by the limitations of our individual perspectives. We've probably all seen variants of this illustration:



(Of course, it's a lot trickier when one party insists they're seeing a two....)

People who have a shared goal of getting closer to the truth have to call out flaws and blind spots in each other's thinking. There's no way around that. But if we lack compassion when we call out those flaws, and start attacking flaws in each other's personalities and affiliations, the predictable result is for people to feel defensive, and to further entrench in their positions.

I have significant expertise in this area, being prone to make pronouncements about various groups (most recently white male writers, in another thread), which quite predictably and rightly prompt defenses of (and by) members of those groups.

If those who correct me do so with compassion and a basic assumption of my goodwill--as everyone in that other thread did--the conversation helps me to see the error of my ways and repent, or at least adjust my argument to correct its most obvious flaws.

On other occasions, when those who have objected to what I've said have attacked me personally and/or as a member of a group that the speaker has issues with--a woman, a liberal, a Catholic, etc.--my instinct has been to take a defensive posture, double down on my flawed thinking, and become determined not to concede even an inch to those I'm battling.

We might all try to bear that in mind. In my family I've seen people I never thought would change their positions do so--but only through conversations that made them feel it was safe to consider trying to meet each other in that vulnerable, exposed "no man's land" in between sides. If there's no cease-fire, everyone just stays in their separate foxholes.

Okay, that's the best I can do at appealing for mutual goodwill, when I'm not as cute as Tienna.

Last edited by Julie Steiner; 02-19-2021 at 10:24 AM.
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  #26  
Unread 02-19-2021, 01:50 PM
James Brancheau James Brancheau is offline
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I don't think the cartoon statement needs commas, Julie. It's not, here, a matter of perspective.
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  #27  
Unread 02-19-2021, 02:49 PM
Julie Steiner Julie Steiner is offline
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I did try to find version of it without that annoying comma, but all of them seem to have it. Maybe it's actually a tiny 9....

Kevin, I don't doubt that the women in your life seem like "better" human beings. And it's possible that they actually are. But I've probably had more cause than you to be suspicious of people who very successfully hide passive-aggressive and even psychopathic qualities beneath a nice, charming, non-threatening façade.

Last edited by Julie Steiner; 02-19-2021 at 03:42 PM.
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  #28  
Unread 02-19-2021, 04:30 PM
James Brancheau James Brancheau is offline
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commas, Julie. I don't want to be nice and sing a song together. America is full of terrorists.
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  #29  
Unread 02-19-2021, 07:47 PM
Julie Steiner Julie Steiner is offline
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Yes, sorry, "commas" plural. I stand corrected. And the cartoon definitely has its limitations. Like you, I think that some things are just objectively wrong, regardless of perspective. But sometimes perspective explains why something objectively wrong can look right to someone.

Terrorists and their less overtly violent sympathizers are not born with those perspectives. They are persuaded--generally through appeals to ethos (authority) and pathos (emotion). Which presumably means that they can be unpersuaded through appeals to ethos and pathos, too.

Appeals to logos (logic) tend to be less successful. Jonathan Swift: "Reasoning will never make a man correct an ill opinion, which by reasoning he never acquired." I don't know about never, but it's certainly a lot easier to change someone's heart than someone's mind.

Empty niceness doesn't change anything, though. I'm not a fan of empty niceness. Just of keeping the focus on what is wrong, rather than on who is wrong.

Last edited by Julie Steiner; 02-19-2021 at 08:26 PM.
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  #30  
Unread 02-20-2021, 10:29 AM
Julie Steiner Julie Steiner is offline
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Here's one of my older favorite philosophers, saying it much better. I've skipped to 11 minutes in, since he was talking about another subject first:

Jay Smooth, "Calling People Out with Compassion"

For relevance, I'll transcribe and edit a bit below, although I recommend the video because (much like Tienna's) his calmly humorous delivery is a large part of my own enjoyment of his message. Here he's talking about his perspective on some troubling aspects of hip hop culture (a creative community that he has loved and blogged about for decades) that he says do need to be called out as wrong. I've removed a few conversational tics that are distracting in written form:

Quote:
If you're going to be a part of a creative community over the span of your life, the community might not always...grow old gracefully with you, in every way? Hip hop, over the years, has come to replicate some of the forms of exclusion that it started out as a refuge from--replicating some of the American patterns of misogyny and homophobia. I think it's important to understand it in the context of it being an endemic problem in American society, and not a hip hop thing. But I also don't think we should use that as a cop-out, either. I think that whatever your community is, you should set the bar higher than "We can be equally fucked up as the rest of America." You should care first and foremost about what's in your backyard and try to set a high standard.

As an adult who wants to be a thoughtful citizen of the world and still represent hip hop, because it has given so much to me that I'm never gonna turn my back on it, and I'm gonna try to represent it, how I lived it--in order to keep doing that, you've gotta learn how to challenge people who are doing things that you hate, in a way that still honors your human connection with them, and your shared connection with them through this cultural bond that you have.

That sort of "Adult Hip Hopper's Tightrope Walk" of finding ways to call people out with compassion has been the biggest principle that I try to take with me, when we talk about all these other issues that we are constantly debating online.

I've tried to apply that to discussions of race, gender, class, where it can be really tempting to just sort of entrench in your side, and take your disagreement as a reason to detach from the other side's humanity. And I don't mean to make false equivalencies. I mean, I think if you're on the less privileged side that traditionally hasn't had a voice, I think there's a different context to you going a little overboard, compared to someone who's always been in the category that has a voice.

But I think that whenever there's the opportunity, especially if you're someone who's a member of a community that's been historically marginalized or disenfranchised, there's going to be times when you need to just tell somebody off, and get the catharsis of telling somebody off. You need to set boundaries and let people know, "No matter what you think, and whether you understand why or not, I can't tolerate you treating me this way."

I think there's a place for that; and there's a place for choosing not to engage at all. But I think when you feel up to it and the space allows for it, I think it's really valuable to seek that sort of common ground engagement, where you speak as honestly as you can about what you think someone is fucking up on, but you do it in a way that honors their humanity and sort of tries to bring them closer to you.

But that sort of balancing act of figuring out how to call people out with compassion has become, as Jesse said, a hot topic, and has inspired a lot of hot takes lately. Someone on my Facebook wall said, "I think this new landscape we have, where there are so many new voices is great, but these Twitter mobs are a bug, not a feature." I've gotta say, I disagree with that. I think Twitter mobs are awesome, for the most part...but they're a feature that's still in beta.

[Deleted: Interruption to watch a short video from Jay's blog, discussing a particular homophobic expression in hip hop culture]

[Deleted: Some context about that clip's creation]

...And it's also an example of me trying to tread that line of talking about something that I think is really ridiculous and messed up, but acknowledging the humanity on the other side. Like, "I get it, I get why it's funny, I get why you get caught up in it, but we should care about how the stuff we're putting out there connects with other people."

I think figuring out how to transmit that message is something we have so much more opportunity to do now. We have so much of a broader conversation. I grew up having Yelling at the TV in a Futile Rage be the only outlet I had. There was this finite group of people from certain demographics that had a huge public voice, and the rest of us just had to sit there and take it. Now, so many people and constituencies that never had a voice are able to say how these connections that used to be one-way are affecting them. And I think it's made all of our culture so much richer and stronger and more humane.

I think there's also been some excess. We've been using those tools, figuring out the best way to use them. When you historically have been marginalized and silenced, and you've had to turn your voice up to 11 in order to be heard, sometimes when you have these new tools, you're gonna instinctively turn things up to 11 when maybe you didn't need to. I think the pendulum has swung pretty far in the direction of being mindful of our language, in ways that are almost always really vitally important. I think that there are times that it goes overboard. But I feel that for every time that there might be some annoyance at some sort of cumbersome rhetorical guideline, that annoyance by far pales in comparison to the effect every day on people who are just belittled, or erased, or made invisible by us using language carelessly, or unknowingly using it in ways that are harmful to them.

As Jesse says, there are growing pains, but we need to be looking at the growing pains in the context of the growth. And the growth has been by such a wide margin worth the growing pains--which I think are just going to keep settling themselves out.
He goes on to apply the Five Stages of Grief to his own ego when he was called out himself for having used an insensitive expression. I found it insightful and funny, but I've transcribed enough. Watch it if you like.

I love Jay Smooth's thoughtfulness and even joy when he discusses race and gender and the uncomfortableness and hurt that often comes in conversations that Americans need to have with each other. He uses so many useful, insightful metaphors--perhaps because he is so connected with poetry, in the form of hip-hop lyrics.

I particularly love his 2011 TEDx talk, in which he contrasts the tonsillectomy vs. dental hygiene models of dealing with racism. GENIUS! Here's that video with a transcription:

Jay Smooth, "How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love Discussing Race."

Last edited by Julie Steiner; 02-20-2021 at 11:52 AM. Reason: typos
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