Just you
This is hilarious – one of the Orbiters talks about the virtues of “cutting people some goddamn slack now and then.”
It’s a post about a tv cartoon show and especially one episode. I know nothing of the show so I make no comment on that aspect. It’s the lack of self-awareness that is so riotous.
[S]o much going on with this episode! At least three major themes: learning to accept other’s imperfections, learning that different social arenas have different rules, and gender fluidity.
Learning to accept [an]other’s imperfections – !! From a blogger at The Orbit! The blog network that just shat on a longstanding friend for a very minor putative transgression two years ago that she apologized for at the time – someone on that network has the gall to talk about accepting other people’s imperfections. It’s hilarious but also sickening.
What the gems have to learn — Garnet and Pearl, anyway — is to cut people some goddamn slack now and then.
Yes, cutting people some goddamn slack now and then is a good idea. That’s all the more true when
- the people are longstanding friends
- the putative wrongdoing is very minor if it’s wrong at all
- the people apologized and planned to do better going forward
- it was two years ago
- it was two years ago
- it was two years ago
But The Orbit didn’t do that. The Orbit did the opposite of that – treated a very minor, debatable wrongdoing from a long time ago as such a horrifying outrage that it merited outright public shunning.
That’s what I still can barely believe, I guess – that they not only agreed to stop offering Amy’s jewelry as rewards for pledges, they also named and shamed her, and repudiated her, in public, for all the world to see.
But hey, by all means cut people some goddamn slack now and then – yourself, at least, and maybe your spouse, and maybe…well no just yourself. You’re the one who counts, after all.
I have been decreasing the amount of time I spend on blogs as it does my brain no good. I was interested to discover the Orbit recently as it includes blogs I have enjoyed, especially Greta’s. However, I’m put off by some stuff I’ve read, especially regarding disability. Now I’ve had a medical condition for all my adult life that has severely limited what I can do. I think I might also meet their definition of neurodivergent.but I’m not sure as I only learned the word today. I’m interested in disability activism and have a lot of personal insight but a lot of it bothers me. Specifically, those who act like if you have a disability it’ the fault of the medical establishment for defining it as a problem and the rest of the world for not putting you at the centre of everything.
I will read The Orbit but I’m not planning on setting up an account. I’m not comfortable with posting on a site where disagreement can lead to a person being denounced or accused of making the place “unsafe”. I don’t feel safe in that environment. I’ve just started treatment for my condition and getting into stupid arguments online is only going to drain me. As I write, I am startled by the irony. I am a bisexual women with long-term medical problems that have blighted my life and certainly meet the legal definition of a disability. However, I am too scared to post at a social justice oriented network because I fear that I will not be welcome if I disagree. Anyone who knows me IRL would be surprised to hear this as I love vigorous debate. What I cannot take is an attitude that condemns practically everyone for not being ideologically pure.
Oh, well. I’d already decided that excessive surfing is bad for me. Less temptation is good for me.
There is absolutely no level of stoop too low for them, is there?
And, like clockwork, now that you have called out the indisputable hypocrisy, Greta or one of the other Pures will step up to heap finger-pointy scorn on you or anyone like you who actually believes the truth, which is that it is indisputable hypocrisy on display.
“How dare you!” they will say. “You are clearly unpure — you have demonstrated as much time and again — so you clearly don’t know what hypocrisy is, nor do you deserve any voice in who deserves goddamn slack and who doesn’t.”
That’s how it will go, then they deploy a number of tactics to make everyone who has a grasp on reality begin to question that grasp.
Let’s see, I predict that they will use: the Bizarre Excuse justification, the Hey-Look-Over-There! attention diversion, the Yeah-But-What-About-You? redirect, the That-Author-Obviously-Wasn’t-Talking-About-that-Situation-Which-In-No-Way-Resembles-This-Situation Alice-In-Wonderland-like reality shift, a That-Author-Does-Not-Speak-for-Us-and-Now-We-Must-Review-Their-Participation-On-This-Site-Because-Cutting-Slack-to-the-Impure-Is-Obviously-Impure throw under the bus, an entirely novel method that doesn’t yet have a name, or some combination of the above, all with the intent to deny that Amy deserves to have any goddamn slack cut for her. Because to hell with Amy, the doctrine doesn’t allow for any demonstration of impurity, ever, without a massively humiliating Walk of Shame, which she hasn’t sufficiently completed.
(And, holy cow, I finally got an eye on a sampling of the artwork by the artist that is replacing Amy. It’s … just … wow.)
Racist new age blackface was the phrase that came to my mind.
I often think of SNL’s ” Church Lady when I read denunciations these days rather than the political denunciations of my youth. Perhaps it is the contrived nature of the thing.
Somewhat tempted to view said new artwork — but I shall resist, keep calm and move on.
Orbit means Really Out There, or some acronym thereof?
Ostensibly Radical But Irredemably Twee
I don’t really have any experience being any kind of activist, so maybe I’m being naive here, but it seems to me that if you want to be an effective activist, you should adjust your level of vitriol to the level of the “offense.”
I’m not pulling a “Dear Muslima” here. You can fight stupid “bathroom bills” in state legislatures and also argue against “lesser wrongs” like referring to abortion as being a (gasp) women’s issue. But maybe you ought to save your strongest condemnation for the former and not the latter? And maybe on issues where it’s just you and a handful of “enlightened” folks battling the other 95% of the world, you ought to lean a little more towards substantive argument and “education” and a little less on condemnation and shaming? If for no other reason than that it isn’t all that effective for a handful of people to try to shame and shun a huge majority.
Of course, I may be working from a false premise, i.e. that the goal is to actually achieve something, as opposed to preening about one’s moral purity.
@7: they’ve set up their own little space at Orbit so they can preen. Effectiveness is not on their minds.
Obnoxious Reactionary Bullies Impersonating Trolls.
or
Odious Rats Begin Intimidation Tactics.
Offensive Rhetoric and Banal Ideas Team
#10 Samantha Vimes: I think you fill the bill. :-) Or bit, fit.
Overly Righteous Bloggers Into Themselves
(Thanks Chris, this is fun.)
Often Reading Badness Into Trivia
(I’ll stop now.)
Only Recognize Bona-fides If Trans
(No seriously, I’m stopping now.)
Over Rated Bloggers Incite Trouble.
Our Realities Beat Incontestible Truth.
Only Read Bits, It’s Trash.
I don’t know what part Greta has had in the Amy-quisition.
But the ‘safety’ and ‘triggering’ stuff is out of hand and self-defeating.
I haven’t followed a specific blog ‘family’ (e.g. FTB) as such. Only specific blogs or posts. The policing of Surly Amy, at least as reported, seems like something the Khmer Rouge would do.
And on a language side-light: the word ‘pure’ used to be a euphemism for dog shit. London street children used to gather ‘pure’ to sell to tanners for some industrial use.
Very reminiscent of that post by Greta, in which she quite accurately describes many of the tactics used to police the motives of others, but completely fails to realise that many of her friends acted exactly as she described very recently. Pretty much a carbon copy, in fact.
Not sure if you will see this comment, but have you seen the comment left by ‘Fiocco di Neve” at that post?
This comment is such a load of shit that it seemed to go beyond even the usual hyperbole demanded of the New Trans Purists – sex absolutely is morphology, you fucking muppet – and so I became suspicious. The name didn’t look much like a name to me, so I tried google translate… and it turns out the name is Italian for ‘snowflake.’ Which strikes me as being a bit too much of a coincidence; Greta is being taken for a ride by perhaps a slymepitter.
But look at her response!
Hook line and sinker. No objection, no explanation, just immediate capitulation to the accusation of having made an “oppressive display of cissexism” by saying that there are male and female bodies. Someone is having a good laugh at her expense, I think people here might appreciate it too.
J the D @ 16 –
Well that’s the thing, though – they speak as a collective. That is, there are places where “The Orbit” talks to the world, using “we” as its pronoun. They do that on Facebook and on that fundraiser where they trashed Amy. Therefore it doesn’t really make any difference what part any particular individual plays, because they are all implicated in whatever The Orbit says when it speaks as The Orbit. It was The Orbit who trashed Amy, so all the bloggers trashed Amy.
It’s kind of mind-blowing that they decided to do this, when the originators are all refugees from FTB who spent a few years there where it was always insisted that we did not speak with a collective voice and had absolutely no desire to.
And we sure as hell never ever spoke as some robotic character called Freethought Blogs who spoke as “we” and issued encyclicals on Facebook.
It’s such a weird thing to do.
Holms @ 18 – good god. My jaw dropped. That comment is OBviously from a slime pitter. It sets off the slimepitradar ping ping ping ping. I’m amazed that Greta’s radar is so defective.
(What should have set off her radar? The comment is too much – it fits all the criteria too neatly. The real assholes don’t do it like that. They don’t include all the clichés one after the other and they do include more random, unpredictable wording. If an apparent Social Justice Zealot comment sounds too perfect, it’s by a slimepitter.)
I’m a massive fan of the whole “the idea … totally erases my lived experience” and how rapidly those who want to kowtow to anyone who makes such a claim are willing to cravenly kowtow to such a claim. As though ideas can erase experiences.
Let’s try a few on for size, shall we?
“The idea that someone might step foot on the moon totally erases my lived experience of having lived on earth my entire life.”
“The idea there might be A or B blood types totally erases my lived experience of having a blood type of O.”
“The idea that Muslims exist totally erases my lived experience of being a Christian.”
“The idea that religions might some day not exist totally erases my lived experience of being a Christian.”
In what other other area of life, culture, society, art, science, etc., does an idea totally erase an experience? Exactly how does this work? What exactly is the logic in play? And why should merely presenting an idea “erase” anything? Holy hell.
I am so happy a slymepitter, of all people, likely got this one past Greta as it helps demonstrate just how thoroughly the righteous doctrine has jammed the radar. The ‘Pitter just threw down the trump card, coded in righteous language, and all thought stopped. They don’t even want to pause to think anymore for fear that doing so might totally erase someone else’s lived experience. As though it could possibly happen.
Yep, it’s the trans purity that threw off her normally-functioning ‘pit radar. There’s just something cloying about this new brand of thought that smothers all rational opposition, I suppose out of dread that even the mildest objection will be subject to the full TERF shunning process they throw around with such abandon.
Even more comical when you know that this term is a typical example of the “Euphemism Treadmill”, as Steven Pinker called it. The medical community needs a term to describe unusually slow-witted individuals. However more people argue, and of course need fresh insult for each other where such terms come handy to describe detractors (also, Shakespeare’s insults are dead as a doornail). The connotation shifts and soon it’s an insult first, and medical term second. The medical community then has to find a new word that isn’t insulting, but of course the new term then comes to describe the “really” slow witted people, is not just an insult, and novel — which makes it attractive as the next new insult against “really” slow-witted people. Once again, the medical community needs to come up with yet another nicer sounding word for those diagnosed as unusually slow-witted and so on. Freethought Blogs were always quite hilarious in that regard, who managed to cook up the most extreme insults, yet also invented elaborate tone police rules along the lines of “Hey, you don’t get to call someone stupid! That’s ableist, you fucking moron!”
The more you know: the way they treat Amy Roth is unfair in this additional way, too, but I can’t say I’m surprised. That’s the US secular movement, after all. I don’t think it causes her much harm though. By now, everyone decent was burnt by social justice warriors, and it’s generally known. The only thing the US movement has achieved was, aside from dissing Richard Dawkins, destroying social justice, dividing the 99% and assuming hypercapitalism and corporatism into the discourse. Nobody cares anymore about slave labour: the complaint is that women aren’t stup— dumb enough to take part in this enough and need more incentives to be bossy. Great! American and left wing is like being a vegan slaughter. Being concerned with “stupid” is just another example. I don’t mind that people discuss superheroes or the meaning of terms, or double entendres in lifts, but that they hate each other over such things — that seems like invented by right wingers, so effective it is. Dear Muslima all the way down.
@Holms
@Ophelia
OK, I have to disagree with you two. Greta was taken in, all right, but I doubt Fiocco di Neve is a slymepitter. That little parody is too well written, too concise, and too accurate. :)
(Whoever wrote it–even if it was a ‘pitter–nice job!)