yknow i was talking to someone a week or so ago and he kept using the word “triggered” in reference to LoL/online gaming etc.
now, i’ve had this guy in class before and overall he seems like a pretty good kid so i was equal parts perplexed and irritated by his use of this. i told him he probably shouldn’t be using that word in that context, and he didn’t seem to be getting it and kept arguing back that he was using it correctly. eventually he got to the point where he pulled up the definition of it on urban dictionary and explained why he was using it
“yes,” i said, “that is the way it’s used in the gaming community, but the fact is that it’s a word used for a legitimate thing in psychology and people using it in that way has taken it away from those who need it to describe things that happen wrt, for example, PTSD. now people who are legitimately ‘triggered’ get treated like a joke.”
“oh,” he said. “I had no idea that’s where it came from.” and he more or less backed off after that
and ive been thinking a lot about that recently.
about how if i should just started out with, “hey i’d rather you not use this, and here’s why,” that conversation would have gone a lot smoother than just my flat out insistence and non-explanation of why he shouldn’t
because people grow up using words a certain way, or learn to use them from communities and may not even know how they affect other people around them.
like i definitely could have left the conversation and decided i didn’t want to deal with it, that would have been valid, but i really wanted to figure out why he was using it and see if i could get him to stop rather than immediately deciding he was just a shitty person and a lost cause
it’s usually best to start off a conversation by assuming the person is benevolently ignorant and go from there
A bonus of this approach is that if they’re *not* ignorant and doing it anyway to be shitty, and you react with a helpful/educational correction, you’re showing them that doing this makes them look naive.
Edgelord kids don’t like to look naive.
#we’ve lost touch with the idea that taking the high road does not only comfort the innocent #it also humiliates your enemies #assuming good faith can be double-edged and cunning! #it does not make you weaker!
Tag: to remember
Being able to feel safe with other people is probably the single most important aspect of mental health; safe connections are fundamental to meaningful and satisfying lives.
Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma
(via asyoulikeitnow)
(via asyoulikeitnow)
I just heard this woman say “you procrastinate because you are afraid of rejection. It’s a defense mechanism, you are trying to protect yourself without even trying.” and I think I just realized what was wrong with me.
Yep, this is a very, very common reason for procrastinating. It’s also why procrastination, even though it’s often associated with laziness, is a fairly common trait in a lot of people with anxiety and perfectionism issues.
This idea – You’re not lazy, you’re protecting yourself – hit me really hard while reading, of all things, Emily Nagoski’s Come As You Are, which turns out to be as much about how brains work and how relationships work as how orgasms work.
In an early part of the book she talks about Fight/Flight/Freeze responses to threats–the example she uses is being attacked by a lion. You fight, if you think you can defeat the lion; you run away, if you think you can escape the lion; and when you think there’s nothing you can do, when you feel the lion’s jaws closing on your neck, you freeze, because dying will hurt less that way. You just stop and go numb and wait for it to be over, because that is the last way to protect any scrap of yourself.
Later in the book, she talks about the brain process that motivates you to pursue incentives, describing it as a little monitor that gauges your progress toward a goal versus the effort you’re expending. If it feels like too little progress is being made you get frustrated, get angry, and, eventually, you… despair. You stop trying.
You go numb and wait for it to be over, because that’s the only way left to protect yourself.
So it occurred to me that these are basically the same thing–when facing a difficult task, where failure feels like a Threat, you can get frustrated and fight it out–INCREASE DOING THE THING until you get where you’re going. Or you can flee–try to solve the problem some other way than straight on, changing your goal, changing your approach, whatever. Fight or flight.
But both of those only apply when you think the problem is solvable, right? If the problem isn’t solvable, then you freeze. You despair.
And if you’re one of those Smart Kids (Smart Girls, especially) who was praised for being smart so that all tasks in the world came to be divided between Ooh This Is Easy and I DON’T KNOW IF I CAN DO THAT AND IF I FUCK UP I WILL DIE, then… it’s pretty easy to see how you lose the frustration/anger stage of working toward a goal, because your brain goes straight to freeze/despair every time. Things are easy and routine or they are straight up impossible.
So, you know, any time you manage to pull yourself up and give that lion a smack on the nose, or go stumbling away from it instead of just falling down like a fainting goat as soon as you spot it on the horizon, give yourself a gold star from me. Because this is some deeply wired survival-brain stuff. Even if logically you know that that term paper is not a lion, it really is like that sometimes.
Opinions aren’t permanent. It’s okay to change your opinion based on new information.
Friendly reminder: We’re all learning and growing.
I feel like society would be a lot less of a mess if we could all remember this.
Not every day has to “count.” Some days, your purpose is to make it to the next one. That counts too.
Damn I needed this today.
Me too, thank you.
at some point we do need to come to grips with the reality that facts are often ineffective at converting people, and figure out a way that is more effective without being widely unethical
I’m frustrated by seeing posts about how climate change is SO OBVIOUSLY real when the core problem is that the people who don’t buy into it either are ideologically/financially biased against the idea, or think science is fake and gay
it doesn’t help that the far left relentlessly criticizes any attempts made to recruit or appeal to centrists for “not being radical enough”. the far right is already relentlessly propagandizing whatever the fuck they want, and at this point refusing to match those efforts with leftist propaganda on the grounds of moral or ideological purity is not only useless but self-defeating. also it turns out being cruel and condescending to people whose opinions might have been swayed serves no fucking purpose other than to prop up the egos of those doing the belittling – who knew?
the simple truth of the matter is that it’s not enough to be correct. it doesn’t matter that the things I say are true and the things my enemy says are false. that, on its own, is not and has never been and will never be enough to convince anyone of anything. you have to be able to sell it. that’s just how human beings work. you can despise that fact all you like, but it’s how things work, and if you genuinely want truth to win against falsehood you don’t have the room to refuse to stoop to advertising it. look up cognitive dissonance and belief disconfirmation. being proven wrong makes people cling harder to their falsehoods. you have to stop pretending that people are rational and logical creatures. if you refuse to play dirty when your enemy is rolling in dirt, you. will. lose.
the idea that “privileged people should speak out on behalf of oppressed people” and the idea that “it’s not the oppressed person’s job to educate” are both good ideas in their contexts.
if you take them out of context and try to scale them up outside of a single conversation into precepts of larger-scale discourse, they IMMEDIATELY become tools of white supremacy and get misused to justify privileged people talking over oppressed people.
I want to expand on this a little more, too – left it short and sweet because I’m too prone to walls of text, but I feel like this deserves a second pass:
Basically, establishing the idea that it is *only ever* the responsibility of people who are privileged in a specific discourse to speak out about oppression leads to the following situation. I have seen it primarily in racism discourse and now in antisemitism discourse, but it’s really all over the bloody place.
1) Someone not in an oppressed group circulates a thing that they made up, or nicked out of context from an off-the-cuff rant by some person in that oppressed group, without checking any kind of group consensus, because that thing is punchy and angery and gets attention. And it’s about ~protecting the weak~ so arguing looks bad.
2) Nobody bothers to run it past the group being spoken of (because that would be “expecting someone to educate you”) or check it against even the cheat sheet versions of decades of existing critical theory by that group (because that would be “work”).
3) Several thousand reblogs later, the echo chamber of privilege has generated a Fact! Doesn’t matter if it doesn’t hold up to analysis. If there are like two or three approving reblogs from people in the group you’re talking about, and a few dozen disputing it? Well, clearly the dozens of folks are just internalizing prejudice, because of course the person who started it knows better than them, poor dears, and they can Prove It, now that they’ve got an endorsement from the handful of affected people who agree with them.
… And then folks start getting policed and yelled at by activists from out of their lane, for practicing their own cultural traditions or talking about their own life experiences or making their own stories and analyses.
The dominant narrative is a steamroller. People in a position of dominance, who decide to blithely attach shit to it without fact checking, have basically just discovered a new, exciting and socially approved way to steamroll minorities.
The system rewards punching down; it rewards talking over people that we’ve been trained to think are lesser. Unpicking this is *hard work*; flowing with the current is not.
Don’t be that person, is what I’m saying. Don’t confuse what’s satisfying with what’s right.
do people not know the 5 minute rule????? if there is something “wrong” with someone’s appearance and it can’t be fixed in 5 minutes don’t tell them!!!! don’t be an ass!!! food in someones teeth? sure! let them know! wrinkled shirt? smudged makeup? messy hair? yes! talk to the person if you want! tattoos/tattoo placement? crooked nose? obnoxious laugh? shut the fuck up!!!! don’t make someone selfconscious about something they can’t fix!!!! dont be a dick!!!
also if they’ve only been on the ground for 5 minutes it’s still safe to eat them
Thanks for the advice, a-giant-spider.
just moving along like everyone else 