Respect
Being respected by others is a Good Thing. Respecting others is a Very Good Thing. Feeling a necessity to require that others respect you can be a little more problematic, seldom works very well, and tends to draw flags.
Hubris
- Excessive pride or self-confidence.
- A primary qualification for successful political blogging/ punditting.
The meme known as #&Name
It seems like just yesterday that a chorus of loud and indignant male voices was rising above the Twitter cloud, and in multiple diaries on Daily Kos, proclaiming #NotAllMen. Actually, it was about six years ago of yesterdays, IIRC (and I do).
And it was explained carefully and patiently, over hundreds of hours of commentary, that there wasn’t any reason to use that hashtag unless you felt personally threatened by a general point that was being made, but sure, you could use the hashtag if you wanted to.
For the last few days, there’s been a new meme, and I’ve found my replies to it uncannily echoing those earlier comments. And I thought I’d take care of that in one fell swoop that I could copy for future use. So, to all the Karens whose noses are currently out of joint, and all the Felicias and Bettys and Richards who have preceded and will follow them, I present:
Re: the meme known as “&Name”
While it may strike you as insulting and perhaps bigoted that a particular name is enjoying a time in the sun as a pejorative, your seeming need to connect that to a decision to insult you personally seems to be a trifle over the top. An insult to a particular individual here is generally seen as a negative; bigotry is generally looked down upon; and the community is indeed tasked with the job of monitoring commentary with respect to the Rules of the Road, by no less than kos himself.
You say that you are being specifically name-called and shamed by reference to this meme, and that, since the community as a whole does not agree, you are being bullied by those who choose to argue the point.
If you can show us that the original meme was based on something that you, as an individual, did, you might be able to make the case for bullying. That you would also be making the case against yourself is a different, but connected, matter. Since you seem to be saying that no part of the meme is based on your individual actions, then you have no reason to believe that you, specifically, are being bullied.
I’m not particularly happy with it, but the meme itself is a legitimate topic of discussion, and that cannot be done without using the particular name that has been associated with it. That you happen to share that name, and choose to take it amiss, does not invalidate the greater conversation.
Until this particular meme runs its course, feel free to begin your comments — or not — with #NotAll(&Name)s.
Being Human
- Nobody ever said that being a responsible adult was comfortable.
- Few people have even managed to define what being a responsible adult means. Usually, they simply to to exclude all the cases which they see as irresponsible, and leave their audience with whatever size hole this ends up defining
- Usually, that hole defines how they want their universe to look once you’ve accepted all their constraints.
- Before you ever go any further on this one, try to say to whom you are responsible, for what, and in what order and circumstances. Then sit down and figure out how many conflicts that’s going to create, and in what situations. Fair warning: if you try to chart this out, it almost always ends up looking like a kitten got tangled in a ball of yarn.
- One of the seeming perks of power is that, for a while at least, you get to let other people tangle themselves up figuring out their responsibility. Eventually, that stops working, too.
- Authors have a great deal to atone for, for portraying people as though they are rational beings
- And that’s without even really trying to define what a rational being is.
- The primary technique for this is to present what the thoughts behind a choice of actions might be, if there were a rational method for choosing a course of action. If you begin reading fiction early enough you can get hooked on the plausibility of this technique, and it can take a while to realize that isn’t how people think at all.
- It’s not really their fault, though, because people want books that will teach them how to be rational beings, or at least hold out the prospect that being a rational being in real time is possible.
- It probably isn’t, and there’s a real limit to how long and how well you can fake it before you trip yourself.
- There are, however, several ways that let you pass as a rational adult, sometimes even to yourself, for a while, if you don’t pay much attention to details.
- Unfortunately, these techniques usually try to exclude emotional reactions and patterning techniques as illegitimate to rational thought, which kind of cuts out the idea of humans managing it in the first place.
- There are no “better” or “worse” human beings, only human beings with the potential for all the “good,” “bad,” or undefined traits anyone has ever managed to describe. Beware of trying to rank human traits on any moral scale or dimension; it will always turn and bite you, and the more rigid your definition, the faster it will happen.
- Note: I wanted to be a Heinlein generalist when I grew up. Now I’m somewhere between that and Alexander Pope — “One science only will one genius fit; so vast is art, so narrow human wit.” But, it still raises my hackles when somebody tells me there’s things I just shouldn’t be capable of — if I want to be a good person (by their definition).
- The narrower the definition you try to fit me into, the more I’m going to make sure I can prove you wrong, because every definition of that sort is an attempt at establishing your rules over my actions.
Social structures and societies; living in the “real” world
- There may be some inherent order to the universe, as far as human thought and experience are concerned, but I’ve seen no proof of it. That’s okay, one of the things we’re pretty good at is imposing a variety of social orders on top of immanent chaos; again, as long as you don’t pay too much attention to the details.
- We are a society that tells hero stories, to the extent that simply living your life doesn’t, somehow, seem to count for very much, if you can’t also manage to be a hero, or at least a unique and highly valued member of society. Heroes, Kings, and Gods all provide order for the times in which they exist, which is one of the reasons we want them so badly.
- Did you ever wonder why the US is/was obsessed by the British Royal Family? They make a case for inherent order in society, though not so much lately. Participatory democracy, at its best, requires the understanding that we mutually impose order within a society, and that order may have to be redefined as the conditions within which it works change. So do all other forms of government, but the effects in those may not show up as quickly
- Any such order will necessarily develop its own hierarchy to accomplish the purposes which it espouses.
- Any such hierarchy will, once established, include as one of its purposes, the continuation of that hierarchy, so that it can best fulfill the purposes for which it was created.
- As soon as that additional purpose is created, it unbalances the original order of that society, even though it is necessary to accomplish its original purpose, and begins to create the need for a different hierarchy than was originally established.
- Thus any working governmental system will always be in tension between its goals and those of the hierarchy developed to meet those goals
- Got a headache yet? The longer such a society goes between corrections of its hierarchies and institutions, the more entrenched they become and the higher the probability of sharp, even violent corrections to those institutions is; the alternative being that participation levels degrade and the society slides into a different and more constrictive form.