Green Room - Week 8 - Day 8
Mar. 20th, 2013 10:23 am![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
clauderainsrm.livejournal.com posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
therealljidolI mentioned it in yesterday’s Green Room, but I was reading one of the many articles goingaround: http://bellejarblog.wordpress.com/2013/03/18/i-am-not-your-wife-sister-or-daughter/ about howyou shouldn’t use the “imagine if it were your sister/wife/daughter” method to engage people on apersonal level, to bring it home to them about how it could impact their own life. Because whilethose things may be true, it isn’t who they are. Saying their relationship to a man isn’t, and shouldn’t be what defines them. No one should do unspeakable things to them. Period. Not because they can be identified as “something relatable” but because they are fellow humanbeings, and you should respect fellow human beings.
This got me thinking...given that the how you take in life is completely subjective by it’s very nature (Unless you can somehow experience it in a way that *isn’t* fundamentally filtered through your own senses, experiences, and perceptions) can you ever truly have empathy for other people or creatures without filtering it as how it relates to you?
“Another person”, “another creature on this planet”, “another living being” all of those have theimplied “like me” attached. You treat people like you would want to be treated. Or like you wouldwant the people you care about treated, and as you grow older and understand more about theworld around you, you extend that caring to wider and wider circles. (Or in some cases, it shrinks. Damn kids... get off my lawn!!!)
It’s a complete side note, because I get what they are saying. But it’s one that I find interesting...given how much ego comes into play, and how much people are the stars of their own lives, with everything else that happens filtered into how it affects them, or how much they care about the effects on others.
Which is why it’s easier just to treat everyone that I meet as “Other”, damn foreigners who areout to steal ‘Merican jobs.Fortunately, you all look alike to me. So I can spot you right away! I amgoing to build a giant fence to keep you out! Because that’s apparently the best way to deal with “people” like you!
While I am putting the fence up, keep yourself busy with this poll:http://therealljidol.livejournal.com/633351.html
Also - “Wanna know what you’re playing for?” (I’ve always wanted to say that!) then check outthe new additions to the Community Chest: http://therealljidol.livejournal.com/633787.html
This got me thinking...given that the how you take in life is completely subjective by it’s very nature (Unless you can somehow experience it in a way that *isn’t* fundamentally filtered through your own senses, experiences, and perceptions) can you ever truly have empathy for other people or creatures without filtering it as how it relates to you?
“Another person”, “another creature on this planet”, “another living being” all of those have theimplied “like me” attached. You treat people like you would want to be treated. Or like you wouldwant the people you care about treated, and as you grow older and understand more about theworld around you, you extend that caring to wider and wider circles. (Or in some cases, it shrinks. Damn kids... get off my lawn!!!)
It’s a complete side note, because I get what they are saying. But it’s one that I find interesting...given how much ego comes into play, and how much people are the stars of their own lives, with everything else that happens filtered into how it affects them, or how much they care about the effects on others.
Which is why it’s easier just to treat everyone that I meet as “Other”, damn foreigners who areout to steal ‘Merican jobs.Fortunately, you all look alike to me. So I can spot you right away! I amgoing to build a giant fence to keep you out! Because that’s apparently the best way to deal with “people” like you!
While I am putting the fence up, keep yourself busy with this poll:http://therealljidol.livejournal.com/633351.html
Also - “Wanna know what you’re playing for?” (I’ve always wanted to say that!) then check outthe new additions to the Community Chest: http://therealljidol.livejournal.com/633787.html
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Date: 2013-03-20 02:22 pm (UTC)I dislike everyone equally, regardless of gender, race, or whatever. Kidding. Kind of.
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Date: 2013-03-20 02:30 pm (UTC)I kind of dislike you, too, but only because you got Frist!
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Date: 2013-03-20 03:33 pm (UTC)I say:
People are human.
Humans make mistakes.
Mistakes are opportunities to learn.
Learn to love and not fear.
Happy First day of Spring! ( I have to love the snow today as the wonderful sun is melting it away. Yay!)
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Date: 2013-03-20 07:52 pm (UTC)Not really but that could be just because I do not understand humans
Fnord
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Date: 2013-03-20 02:29 pm (UTC)But I respect everyone, unless they do something really idiotic or mean to make me *not* respect them. So at least that's something, right? :)
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Date: 2013-03-20 02:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-03-20 05:49 pm (UTC)Haha! With you on both counts. Partly, perhaps, because I know how awful it is to the person who has been hurt.
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Date: 2013-03-20 02:55 pm (UTC)The point of this line of reasoning is to realize that other people have lives just like you and the people you love do. It kinda feels like getting all bent out of shape over semantics for the hell of it. The whole article reeks of "I am better than you because I saw the SEEEKRIT SUBVERSIVE MESSAGE IN AN OTHERWISE TOTALLY NORMAL LINE OF REASONING."
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Date: 2013-03-20 05:08 pm (UTC)The problem though is that you very often DO have to convince other women. It's not just the outright misogyny that is the problem, it's also the hidden misogyny that's learned. It's what happens when girls say things like 'I don't like other girls, they're all bitches' or 'well she knew what guys were like, she shouldn't have been so stupid'. We're taught that women are weaker and lesser than and we sort of believe it, because we don't often see another view represented. I've been meaning to make a Big Girl Blog post on breaking out of the mindset of 'all my friends are guys and other girls are dumb' and learning to appreciate and love other women, actually. I should go do that.
All that said, I don't always jive with the pedantic rhetoric that flourishes on the internet. Especially in the social justice corners.
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Date: 2013-03-20 05:21 pm (UTC)Also,
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Date: 2013-03-20 09:26 pm (UTC)And yes. I can sometimes see some of the things people bring up when they pick things apart, but I feel like there is a line where it becomes too intense and pedantic and I don't really flow with that. I have to go outside sometimes! I don't have time to pick everyone apart!
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Date: 2013-03-20 05:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-03-20 08:57 pm (UTC)Yeah, I spend too much time on Tumblr rolling my eyes and not saying anything.
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Date: 2013-03-20 09:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-03-21 03:01 am (UTC)And they have to hire ghost writers to write the "good guy" characters, because there's no "good" in them. :)
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Date: 2013-03-21 04:22 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-03-20 05:20 pm (UTC)Running short on time here, but I agree with everything you said. "What if it was someone you love?" does not mean "you own your loved ones" and it sure as hell doesn't mean "group X owns group Y." It just means people are more inclined to care about people they love than about random strangers, which, well....duh.
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Date: 2013-03-20 05:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-03-20 05:59 pm (UTC)Quite frankly, I don't think there's anything wrong with not caring about everyone in the first place, because there are more humans on the planet than I have fucks to give.
Rawr, gotta end this comment now to go work, so I'll spare you 10 paragraphs of Slytherin meta :p
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Date: 2013-03-20 06:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-03-20 07:59 pm (UTC)Why what sort of world would we get if everyone defaulted to logic?
No fighting
No killing
no wmds
no comedies
IT WOULD BE VULCAN!
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Date: 2013-03-20 03:25 pm (UTC)And by "the world is full of people," I mean pretty much everybody.
So,
"You try to define me by my relationship to a man."
"You try to marginalize me because I'm a PoC."
"You discriminate against me because of my weight."
"You can't possibly think clearly because of your religion."
"If you believe X you are morally bankrupt."
"Life isn't fair."
"Life should be fair."
"Life would be fair if (group of people) would do/stop doing (thing.)"
At the same time, broad generalizations tend to look a lot different when applied to a specific person. So, when you're challenging generalizations with a person you don't know well, you can't say, "What if it was Suzie or Mack?" Because, aside from celebrities, you don't know the people that person knows. But you figure they have a family member or a friend, so "what if it was your..." is substituted for the proper name.
As if there was much hope of one complete stranger convincing another complete stranger to adjust a strongly-held belief based on a conversation on the internet. (<- hint, this is also a belief, for which there might be specific contradictions.)
ramblemumblesnarf. I've had no caffeine and I'm hungry.
::stands and stares blankly into GR fridge, holding the door open::
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Date: 2013-03-20 05:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-03-20 06:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-03-20 09:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-03-21 02:59 am (UTC):PpPpPpPpPpP
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Date: 2013-03-20 05:01 pm (UTC)And I don't know. I like to think that I have empathy, but I've had people tell me that I don't, that what I'm dealing with is more on a sympathy level and I don't give other people's internal struggles enough due. Which is possible. Everything I react to has come through extremely subjectively anyway. Even if I feel like I'm doing these things, if no one else sees it does it really matter one way or another in the world outside of me?
On the other hand, one the phrases that makes me the most angry is 'you wouldn't understand', because really? You don't think that on some level I could relate to what's happening, regardless of whether or not I've been in that exact situation? You don't think I have felt a varied range of emotions for a varied range of experiences and that I wouldn't be able to synthesize the feeling down and find something in it to relate to? Because fuck, I might as well be a robot at that point. Has anyone got a cyberman around? I think I need to be upgraded.
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Date: 2013-03-20 05:45 pm (UTC)God, yes. Just by witnessing the devastation to that other person, you can see how terrible it is for them and that feeling bleeds right over into you. At least, it does for me. Maybe that's atypical (funerals just destroy me).
OTOH, there are a lot of people who seem to have been raised to be self-entitled and thing only of themselves these days, but that's a larger societal trend. :(
Can I toss a box of hippies into the Community Chest prize list? ;)
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Date: 2013-03-20 06:30 pm (UTC)On a side note, does anyone else find themselves ridiculously addicted to cheese? Like NOMNOMNOM cheese? Cuz seriously, YUM CHEESE!
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Date: 2013-03-20 07:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-03-20 08:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-03-20 08:17 pm (UTC)You are quite dedicated to the cheese!
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Date: 2013-03-20 08:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-03-20 08:47 pm (UTC)I'm sorry, is that cheesy?
;)
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Date: 2013-03-20 09:00 pm (UTC)That made me lol...and made me think "it's not easy being cheesy". :headdesk: Oh Lord I'm sick.
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Date: 2013-03-20 10:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-03-20 08:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-03-20 09:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-03-20 06:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-03-20 08:17 pm (UTC)or the lack of adiquite food would be best as there are people in the USA who go with out running water, electricity, heat and even food.
Bathing in the open is only a problem if you were taught that such exposure is indecent.
I have had to live in my car
There are communities of people living in the sewers and access tunnels or out of tents in the USA.
There may not be as many as in Africa, India, or central and south America but they are here.
we have people who are working and homeless do not kid yourself.
What is a living wage differs from one place to another and it takes more to cover those basics here. While there are places to help they oftain fall short and frequently set the Max earned too low such that many people fall into a gray area were they do not earn enough to get by but earn too much to get aid.
One could say the biggest issue is the lack of help in those areas and in many cases the militaries that take what ever they want from the people were they are at.
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Date: 2013-03-20 07:49 pm (UTC)I didn't comment or post a rec list cause my sinus are killing me and I cant find my mouse.
Stoopid cordless mouse.
Stoopid headache.
Also the reason I have not written a hg entry.
I'm going to go take 1500mg of acetaminiphrine and get a bath.
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Date: 2013-03-20 08:19 pm (UTC):)
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Date: 2013-03-20 11:08 pm (UTC)I do think there's plenty of ignorant and stupid stuff going around about this case - mainly the whole "Aww, poor perpetrators are going to have their lives ruined by a rape conviction" - okay, that's dumb. If you don't want a rape conviction, don't rape people, ya moron. Ditto the victim-blamey shit all like "well, she went to a party and got drunk, so she's responsible for what happened" - completely idiotic for completely obvious reasons. But the idea that "hey, this could be someone you love!" equals "Women are property!" is just absurd. I think the vast majority of people (of any gender or demographic) who want to protect their loved ones (also of any gender or demographic) want to do that because they love them, not because they think they're property.
As for the empathy bit...*lassos piece of teal deer from yesterday*
A lot of us (self included, I ain't ashamed to admit it!) just don't have the time, energy, or inclination to give a fuck about everyone and everything. Children die from hunger all over the globe, disease and poverty run rampant in many places, horrific government oppression runs equally rampant in others...people only have so many fucks they can conceivably give before exhaustion sets in and there just aren't any fucks left, and it's only natural to be inclined to save those fucks for people and issues close to yourself.
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Date: 2013-03-21 01:31 am (UTC)I'm going to play devil's advocate here. Because one point does tend to get lost in the HOW DARE PEOPLE BLAME HER glare. She *is* responsible for going to a party and getting drunk. That's certainly not an invitation for anyone to do *anything* to her, but less the horrific things that happened. But she did make that choice to do that. She's responsible for the amount of alcohol she drank and for deciding to hang around. She should have woken up with a massive headache, and feeling like grap and I would be on the frontline of saying "Yeah, that's what you get".
As is, she did leave herself vulnerable to all sorts of stuff. But while it's definitely unreal to say that she's responsible for *that* happening to her, because no-f'ing way - I do wish that more people would admit that it wasn't the best decision-making instead of lumping it all in with the "DON'T JUDGE HER!"
People do stupid things all the time, things that put themselves in a more vulnerable or impaired situation than they should be in, and they hate it when they are called on it, because they should just be able to go out and "have fun". (which is a whole different rant about you damn kids...)
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Date: 2013-03-21 02:55 am (UTC)A'ight, the way I see it, there are two separate issues here - one is the rape aspect, and the other is the "dumbass high school kids having a crazy underage drunken party" aspect, and they're two entirely different things. But since quite a few people will agree that Issue 2 is, in its own right, just flat-out bad decision making, people who want to blame the victim for her own assault have better luck doing so by piggybacking Issue Number 2.
Looking at that second issue alone - not gonna argue with you for five damn seconds on that one. If you go out and get drunk as a skunk, and the next morning you're hungover as hell and spend the day praying to the porcelain god and desperately wishing the invisible elephants would quit tapdancing on your skull...that's a direct result of shit you did to your own big bad self, and hey, lesson learned. Don't drink like a dumbfuck, because alcohol causes puking and hangovers.
Alcohol doesn't cause rape though. Rapists cause rape. And that's where the "she brought this on herself" argument falls completely apart. Rape isn't a natural phenomenon or some involuntary physical reaction. It's not the same as saying "she was drunkenly dancing on a bar stool, so it's her own fault she fell off and got hurt" or "she got wasted as fuck, so it's her own fault she got hung over." Physical assault is something that one person chooses to inflict upon another, because *they* made the bad decision to violate another human being. It's not some immutable force of nature like gravity (drunken barstool dancing = kaboom) or the body's natural reaction to ingesting poison (you barf and feel like shit, even if it's a really *fun* poison at the time), so it doesn't make sense to classify it the same way at all. But...people sure as hell try, and IMHO they intentionally blur those lines because it makes it easier to blame the victim.
*Everyone* who's at a crazy drunken underage booze festival getting wasted as hell is making a dumb decision, or at the very least, making a decision that could put them in danger of dealing with Unpleasant Shit - they might get hangovers, alcohol poisoning, busted by the cops, busted by their parents, whatever. So sure, our Jane Doe did make *that* bad decision, as did everyone else at the party, and everyone at any of the zillions of parties like it. But the whole internet isn't up in arms every time a teenager gets stupid with a liquor bottle (it's usually just dismissed as silly teenage shenanigans), so this self-righteous chorus of "Well SHE got drunk, it's her fault!" just comes off as a pathetically flimsy excuse to victim blame. Just because more bad shit happened to this girl than normally happens to teenagers who go to crazy drunken underage parties doesn't mean she's any more guilty of bad decision making than any other kid her age who went to a crazy drunken underage party, ya know? So it's ridiculous to say that she had anything coming to her other than a hangover and perhaps an MIP - yet people want to crucify her for it, which is bullshit, because the bad shit that happened to her was a result of other people choosing to rape her, not a result of her drinking underage.
(Also - it's unclear whether or not the victim in this case had actually been drugged, but it's a definite possibility that was alleged at one point. If that's the case, then it removes the "well she chose to get blackout drunk" smokescreen from the equation entirely, unless people wanna say she chose to get roofied too. Not that her being drunk is any excuse for assaulting her, but the people who are trying to use it as one might not even have *that* to fall back on for a convenient source of misdirection.)
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Date: 2013-03-21 03:18 am (UTC)I was all ready to post a long reply to gary's comment and then I read yours and was thankful because now I don't have to because you said it all brilliantly! Thank you!