cambriancrew

[cambriancrew]

Don't minimize it as something you "don't honestly support".

Doing a racist experiment about hypothetical genocide is still being racist and fascist.

But for the record, no. Of all my faults, I do not legitimately wish to exterminate conservatives.

I did want to test, after the posts from some people defending white Germans who supported Hitler, if anyone would resort to defending the Confederacy in response to inflammatory enough rhetoric.

It's also fascinating to see who would believe I'd honestly support a genocide of conservatives.

[cambriancrew]

I think in regards to a certain syscourser, that person may have fallen deep into the conclusion rabbit hole of "Being the better person doesn't work."

It does. It's just not as fast or flashy. Often progress stalls or even goes backwards. But it does push forward over time.

"The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice." Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

And even if being the better person isn't working NOW, it's ALWAYS worth being as a thing on its own.

[cambriancrew]

Just saw a man ride past in a bicycle with another man sitting on his lap like in a bridal carry

[cambriancrew]

I need to say this as clearly as possible:

Wishing for conservative families to experience the kidnapping and forced re-education of their children, the same way it was done to Native families, is not righteous retribution no matter how cathartic it feels. It is 110% racist.

Sophie. Listen. (I know you likely won't but bruh.) You are taking the suffering of Native children and families — real pain, real trauma, real lives stolen and broken and yes, often just straight up murdered (where's your bloodless genocide? Sure as hell not here) — and turning it into a rhetorical weapon to laugh at.

The boarding school system wasn't just a bad thing that happened in the past that you can joke about. it was a campaign of cultural erasure and child abuse, rooted in white supremacy. Quoting it as a punishment fantasy for other white people trivializes what Indigenous people went through. That makes it racist even if you're using against mostly people who are white.

If your idea of justice looks like reenacting colonial violence on new targets, you haven’t rejected the racist, bigoted empire. You’ve just crowned yourself the new conqueror.

And no one should be having to tell you that that's EVIL.

Just like there are no ethical billionaires, there's no ethical emperors.

-----

To any Native systems or individuals reading this:

I'm so sorry this comparison was ever made. Your trauma is not a rhetorical device, not a revenge fantasy, not a metaphor for someone else’s outrage. It is real. It is yours. It is sacred, and absolutely sacrilegious to be used like this.

You deserve remembrance and healing and justice. Not to see atrocities like this twisted like this.

And for those of us who do care about real justice: we can do better than this. We can listen to Native voices, like the Native systems and singlets who've already spoken out about this. We can support Indigenous-led movements for truth, healing, and sovereignty.

One we've seen around is NDN Collective, which looks like a good one, lots of actual activism and pushing for change and real justice, though honestly we don't know much about it yet, but are looking into it. I'd welcome in my inbox any others y'all know so we can lift up Native voices and share and support real activism.

(Also sorry for a lot of repetition both in what we said and repeating what other folks have already said. We wrote this a little distractedly while at work which makes us wordy.)

I generally think genocide is wrong... But people who claim the Confederacy, a short-lived rebellion founded solely to defend the institution of slavery and uphold white supremacy, as their "culture" are making the strongest argument that there might be exactly one instance where a cultural genocide would be acceptable.

There were only two things of value the Confederacy ever contributed. One was eroding America's sympathy for the South so much that Lincoln could get away with freeing their slaves with a pen stroke. The other was sending more than 200000 Confederate traitors to be removed from the gene pool.

[cambriancrew]

We don't mean to continue harping on you and we appreciate that you didn't mean to minimize what Sophie said but a big problem is not just how horrible what she's describing is, it's the racism. The anti-Native racism. We're a little disturbed that nobody responding to her is bringing up how racist she's being, SPECIFICALLY against Native folks. Editing your response and still leaving out the racism continues to dodge the issue - what she's describing would be a crime against humanity, yes. But she is specifically stealing our history and our trauma to attention-seek with. If you're going to reward her with the attention she wants, it is the least you can do for Native systems in these spaces to directly acknowledge the specific harm she is doing TO US.

Ah, I totally get it now. I'm so sorry. That's an absolutely fair and just thing to want. I'm not sure how to properly word it (we're white, never experienced any racism, so we feel woefully inadequate here) but I'll take some inspiration from the things you've said in this anon and the last and see if I can say anything that hits home how insidious (and overt like omg not even trying to hide it) and evil the racism is in this. It may be a little bit (an hour or so) as work tends to get busy in the last couple hours of the day and I'm about to get back into it, but I'll do it. And once I have, if you have any suggestions on ways to edit and improve it I'll gladly take those.

Thank you for all you've said on this.

[cambriancrew]

It's human to want vengeance. To want an eye for an eye, or worse.

But it's ethical to choose justice instead.

It may feel good — cathartic, powerful, like divine retribution — to imagine bad things happening to bad people. And in small doses it's fine.

But feeding into those feelings? Soaking in them? It may feel at first like a warm bath, but you're soaking in acid. It's going to eat away at you.

It's like the saying about harboring hate being like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die.

[cambriancrew]

Reblogging to fight with Sophie, who is not going to listen to you anyway, is not worth triggering Native systems by forcing us to see that gleeful description of the horrific violence done to our communities and families like it's a fun little hypothetical for her to Trigger The Conservatives with. Please consider at least adding some kind of content warning to your reblog, because we like your blog, but as a Native system that is one of the most viscerally upsetting things we have ever read online. If you MUST reblog that vile shit please at least call out the grotesque racism in what she said as well as a general 'kidnapping is wrong'. She isn't talking about kidnapping. She is very specifically and admittedly describing what was done to US.

My apologies for not tagging, and for using phrasing that implied that I thought it was less severe than it truly would be. My intent was more "the most minimal way of describing this is still heinous. Of course it's actually soooo much worse and that's putting it mildly but like... How can you not see that this is absolutely despicable no matter how you try to minimize it." I'll be more careful with both language and tagging in the future.

[cambriancrew]

... Kidnapping is also morally wrong? (Edited to add: This would actually be EXTREMELY much worse. My intent is only "the most minimal way of describing this is still EXTREMELY BAD. A horrible crime against humanity. What it actually is is so extremely bad I don't have words to describe how bad. ")

I get that you're on this punitive justice kick, imagining awful things happening to awful people, as some sort of like catharsis maybe... but like... That's horrifically inhumane.

I generally think genocide is wrong... But people who claim the Confederacy, a short-lived rebellion founded solely to defend the institution of slavery and uphold white supremacy, as their "culture" are making the strongest argument that there might be exactly one instance where a cultural genocide would be acceptable.

There were only two things of value the Confederacy ever contributed. One was eroding America's sympathy for the South so much that Lincoln could get away with freeing their slaves with a pen stroke. The other was sending more than 200000 Confederate traitors to be removed from the gene pool.

[cambriancrew]

Sometimes we forget that things that are common slang for us just have the normal common meaning to other people.

Case in point, one year we mentioned in passing to our mom that we were low on spoons. Meaning spoon theory. We assumed she understood without even realizing we were assuming anything.

A few months later, in our Christmas box she sent, she included a pack of spoons.

Super thoughtful but like... Not at all what we meant!

[cambriancrew]

Killing bigots and racists and even murderers still makes you a killer. In other words, NOT A GOOD PERSON.

There's a reason we have a justice system instead of vigilantes and lynchings and civil war. The American Civil War was not some pure and holy, righteous triumph of good versus evil. It was a tragedy. So many people died. And yes, many of those people were terrible people. It doesn't matter. Mass deaths are not something to rejoice over.

I feel like certain people in syscourse would watch Death Note (spoilers ahead) and think Light/Kira was justified and right in killing criminals, even before he went into killing people who got in his way. The whole point is that he's NOT right. (And neither is L. Remember his first clue was setting someone up to die. Sure, a criminal. But he still DIED.) And even then, at the end, Light's death is still a tragedy.

Everyone deserves life. That life may be rotting in prison for heinous crimes, but death is not justice. It is, at best, preventative of further crime. True justice is accountability, penalty, and restitution.

"Death to all X" is not justice. And never will be justice. Never justified. No exceptions.

Yeah, even that one you're thinking of.

Not because it's a slippery slope, not because an easy death is preferable to prison.

Because human life must be seen as innately valuable because the alternative is condoning murder — and losing sight of your own humanity.

Because the moment we forget that life is valuable, the moment we try to justify murder, we become the monsters ourselves.

[cambriancrew]

I don't have the time or spoons at the moment to answer all of this, but thank you for the obvious time and effort you put into this.

Just want to gently rebut one part that really stuck out to me first:

Most NDPs do see their plurality as a psychological phenomenon. There's significant interest in things like EEG studies, and the tulpa FMRI study that's been done and is going to be published eventually.

Most see the primary difference between their plurality and that of traumagenics as primarily being a matter of origin, and the different level of effects of trauma on that plurality.

I'll write a full thing answering all of your post later, I just can't right now as I'm headed out the door to work. I really do appreciate you sharing your thoughts and perspective.

Do you think science has proven that only trauma and dissociative disorders can cause the experience of being many thinking, feeling, acting entities in a brain? Well do I have a prize for you.

$100 USD is on the line.

All you have to do to claim it is be the first person to find and share one source — one single, reputable source (officially published, peer reviewed, can be a research paper or an article in a reputable journal or site) by someone with a degree in psychology or psychiatry — that says that trauma and CDDs are the only thing that can cause that experience.

Please note that sources saying that trauma is what causes DID do NOT count. We're looking for a source saying that trauma AND CDDs are the only thing that can cause plurality.

Best of luck.

[cambriancrew]

I think one of the reasons we listen to music so much is because of how all over the place our/us-Willows' thoughts tend to be. Usually a couple of us are thinking about the same thing and talking back and forth about it, and sometimes one of us is just quietly observing (usually Shiloh) and making occasional comments. But that still leaves three of us actively thinking.

Music is a thing that helps us split attention - one or more of us can quietly sing along in our head but that takes very little energy, leaving extra brain power for those of us trying to think about something.

And sometimes we just all sing and it's like a mental rest break.

Though sometimes it can be weaponized - one person singing it Really Loud in our head, filling our head with it and drowning out everyone else.

I don't really have a point to this post. Just kinda musing.

[cambriancrew]

I really like Drifting as a term!

mmmmm ok high system thoughts. some kinda terminology about. potential energy, when you're switching but it's not solidified who youre gonna switch to yet. like, you know yourenot the last person fronting, but who is switching in hasn't begun doin so yet. so youre like personified potential energy. the inbetween . does this make sense to anyone else??? I wonder if this a median exclusive thing. idk

[cambriancrew]

This is extremely common for us Willows (endogenic median subsystem) when we're in a severe migraine or fibro flare - we're often a blendy mess with one of us four being lightly tethered to the front and in what feels like the state of leaving it but none of us the rest of us are coming forward - usually unable to. So we're just a half-present soup. Sometimes with rapid switching mixed in, others of us partly coming to front but not like... Really there.

We just call it Soup. But a word for that potentiality state would be neat. Especially for people who experience it without the added stress that comes with our personal experience of it.

mmmmm ok high system thoughts. some kinda terminology about. potential energy, when you're switching but it's not solidified who youre gonna switch to yet. like, you know yourenot the last person fronting, but who is switching in hasn't begun doin so yet. so youre like personified potential energy. the inbetween . does this make sense to anyone else??? I wonder if this a median exclusive thing. idk

[cambriancrew]

anyway you should always remember that all those foreigners you see dying on the news are just as real people as you are who have just as much interiority as you do. there is nothing about you that makes you more important and it is by pure chance that you are not in their position. in fact, this holds for all of history. every person, no matter the horror of the fate that befell them, had just as much interiority as you do. i feel like some people haven't fully internalized this.

[cambriancrew]

One of my more radical beliefs is that everyone, regardless of occupation, should be required to take a first aid course at some point in their adult life so that, even if you don’t keep up the cert, if someone says to you “My chest has been really hurting and I’ve been having trouble breathing I think I’m gonna lay down for a bit” your hindbrain kicks in and you say “That’s a bad idea. We’re going to the ER.”

[cambriancrew]

One of my more radical beliefs is that everyone, regardless of occupation, should be required to take a first aid course at some point in their adult life so that, even if you don’t keep up the cert, if someone says to you “My chest has been really hurting and I’ve been having trouble breathing I think I’m gonna lay down for a bit” your hindbrain kicks in and you say “That’s a bad idea. We’re going to the ER.”