chamerionwrites

[chamerionwrites]

it’s always jarring talking about shock value in fiction— a term I’m always so hesitant to use, personally— and hearing someone say how something in a book is too unrealistic or too unpleasant (implicitly: to exist) and it’s outright things I’ve experienced

there’s especially this push in certain spaces that feminism means not acknowledging or portraying suffering past some nebulous point of tastefulness. and it’s so frustrating! making real things, that happen to real people, more societally unspeakable certainly isn’t protecting anyone

[chamerionwrites]

I cannot emphasize enough how important learning more than one language is for like. broadening your horizons mentally. not only is it good for your brain health (numerous studies on this already) but also i do think speaking 2+ languages and actually utilizing that skill on a consistent basis builds your openness to different human experiences emotionally too i truly believe this

[chamerionwrites]

evergreen post apparently

(Source)

[chamerionwrites]

It's not the comparison that's a problem. It's that the language people use indicates so little understanding about the what and how and why of state repression. People recognize the visual signifiers, but when they have to describe what they're seeing it's a fuzzy disembodied concept of violence that Just Happens, Out There, in Those Other Countries ("third world" used as a pejorative to indicate poverty and state repression, rather than with any awareness of the term's political history).

It's the equivalent of speaking in the passive voice. "A man was killed" who killed him??? "A third world police state" and who's in the habit of arming, funding, and supporting those??????!? Because I think .02 seconds of reflection would lead to a little less hand-wringing

Need to stress that I am not giving anybody a hard time for expressing outrage; outrage is correct and good. That said it's a struggle to keep my eyeballs from rolling right out of my head and across the floor at the way some people are choosing to express outrage, namely earnest shockhorror about how masked ICE agents snatching people off the street is like some kinda third world police state!!!!!!!! Yeah bro. That's cos you're looking at a US-government-funded paramilitary organization. Truly the human brain's ability to pattern-match is unsurpassed 🙃

[chamerionwrites]

Corporate needs you to find the difference between this picture and this picture

Need to stress that I am not giving anybody a hard time for expressing outrage; outrage is correct and good. That said it's a struggle to keep my eyeballs from rolling right out of my head and across the floor at the way some people are choosing to express outrage, namely earnest shockhorror about how masked ICE agents snatching people off the street is like some kinda third world police state!!!!!!!! Yeah bro. That's cos you're looking at a US-government-funded paramilitary organization. Truly the human brain's ability to pattern-match is unsurpassed 🙃

[chamerionwrites]

Need to stress that I am not giving anybody a hard time for expressing outrage; outrage is correct and good. That said it's a struggle to keep my eyeballs from rolling right out of my head and across the floor at the way some people are choosing to express outrage, namely earnest shockhorror about how masked ICE agents snatching people off the street is like some kinda third world police state!!!!!!!! Yeah bro. That's cos you're looking at a US-government-funded paramilitary organization. Truly the human brain's ability to pattern-match is unsurpassed 🙃

[chamerionwrites]

they hate me for my ardent refusal to accept cruelty as the status quo

[chamerionwrites]

[chamerionwrites]

We may have cut a few hundred thousand public sector jobs in everything from education to disaster recovery, but you know who has “we’re hiring” ads all over town?

[chamerionwrites]

This knowledge continues to offend me down to the marrow of my bones every time I remember it both because (1) they can find endless money to terrorize people but nothing to actually improve human lives and also (2) christ imagine selling your soul and not even getting six figures for it

I live fairly close to the Canadian border, which is how I know that they're offering CBP officers $20k-$30k recruitment incentives

[chamerionwrites]

I think it's unhelpful for us to say things like "it costs you nothing to be kind" or "kindness is easy", not just because it's untrue (it ISN'T true that kindness is easy or low-impact to perform all of the time, and we shouldn't act like that's a moral failing when it's normal and inevitable) but because it's actually IMPOSSIBLE.

Kindness is, by definition, the presence of thoughtfulness. You cannot be thoughtful without intent and effort, even if that effort isn't in any way a burden or a downside to you. It can be a JOY to care for others in that way, and you may still simply not have the resources or the energy in a current moment to act on that joy, and in that moment, you are likely to be thought-LESS rather than thoughtful. So when we lie to people and tell them kindness should feel easy and organic, we literally teach them that kindness looks like thoughtlessness.

Maybe that's not a helpful way to internalize your values. Maybe reminding ourselves that kindness DESERVES our time and attention ESPECIALLY when it's hard is a more effective way of spreading real kindness amongst ourselves.

I dunno, just thinking about things recently.

[chamerionwrites]

I am needlessly riled by all the posts and humans' inherent goodness.

Humans are *neutral*, man. That's why improving society really needs to look like making doing the right thing the path of least resistance.

A majority of people sit right around the tall bit of some sort of bell curve with "does selfish shit that could hurt others by default, is generous under the right circumstance" is one side of the peak and "is generous by default, will do selfish shit that could hurt others under the right circumstances" on the other.

You can observe it any day by observing people under stress (eg: bad traffic, busy supermarket, an unexpectedly un/pleasant interaction with a stranger who is very different to you) - and in yourself in circumstances you find particularly stressful.

[chamerionwrites]

Blessed/cursed with just enough low-grade paranoia to be painfully aware that literally everything you say whilst trying to meet up with an activist group makes you sound like an op

[chamerionwrites]

come play blorbos with me

we can do tghis. our touy

[chamerionwrites]

I agree with you that all of these things are unjust, and I appreciate you adding this perspective. That said I can't help but note that the tone of your post seems agitated and defensive, and I would hate for you to feel upset or dismissed by the above conversation when it's already in agreement with what you've said here.

Absolutely no one in the above chain of messages claimed that people in the United States can't possibly know a torture survivor(s). I said that torture is comparatively rarer than sexual assault (this speaks to the sheer prevalence of sexual assault, more than the rarity of torture). And I said that on top of that torture is widely perceived to be more rare than it actually is, due to ideology and propaganda and the silencing/othering/marginalization of survivors and groups likely to contain survivors. The above posts are about how people's - frequently inaccurate - perceptions feed into apathy and lack of empathy around this subject, and about how societal injustices help to create those false perceptions. At no point is anyone claiming those perceptions are correct.

We are on the same side and we are saying the same things.

@lagren0uille replied to your post “Also while we’re on this subject (torture)”

goooosh i feel this so much!! there’s nothing as a reader that makes me more uncomfortable than when ppl use torture as a simple « narrative device » (without addressing the moral issues + psychological csqs it involves), or for the sake of titillation (and yes, i’ve seen that happen very often -in dark fiction or fics, especially)

but also i think the parallel with rape is rather interesting bc it raises the question of how we construct (as a society and readership) the notion of  « moral intolerable-ness ». child abuse and sexual violence, for example, are immediately identified as moral markers, but torture or other forms of extreme violence, less so.

i think it has to do with how society addresses those forms of violence in general, and torture (at least i think) is sm people see as much more abstract and distant than other forms of violence

Absolutely. It absolutely has to do with the way that society (shoutout to countless horrid politicians and media personalities) and fiction frame the issue. That’s the case for all kinds of issues, but I suspect the problem is especially bad here because for a good chunk of the world, the odds of it actually happening to them or to anyone they know are quite low. Most people know someone who’s experienced sexual violence. A lot of people know someone who was abused as a child. It’s rarer to know someone who was tortured, or even to know someone who knows someone who was tortured. As you say, it seems distant. The only personal experience a lot of people will ever have with torture is the portrayals they see on TV, so the bad takes reproduce themselves endlessly. 

I think a lot of people (especially people who haven’t put much thought into it) tend to conceptualize torture as just another brand of physical violence, which is part of why there’s such an appalling breakdown of public empathy when it comes to issues like solitary confinement: if your brain is slotting it into the same broad category that it uses to think about fistfights or stabbings or shootings, then the measure of awfulness is how badly injured you are afterwards. But there’s…a lot more going on with torture than the infliction of physical pain.

(Of course, irl, that’s not actually a good measure of awfulness even for relatively straightforward physical violence; someone might badly lose a fistfight and be relatively ok once the damage heals, but develop PTSD from a car crash even though they walked away uninjured. There are a lot of factors that cause trauma other than blood and broken bones. It helps explain why so many people are so DENSE about this subject, though.)

And while I wasn’t actually thinking of this when I wrote the post, I believe you’re totally onto something when you say that it raises the question of how we (both irl and as readers) construct the idea of what’s morally intolerable - the difference between what we conceptualize as “merely” Very Bad and what we conceptualize as Unforgivable Taboo. And with that in mind I think it’s important to say that I invoke the comparison to rape not as commentary on the morality of torture - though both are certainly morally repugnant acts - but as commentary on the nature of torture.

I’m not an expert by any means but I did do a lot of reading on the psychology of torture at one point, and the way people (both torture survivors and torturers) process it psychologically strikes me as exceedingly close to the way people (again, both survivors and perpetrators) process sexual violence. Which is pretty unsurprising, if you think about it at all; when you boil the thing down to its most essential elements torture is dehumanization, and violent assault on agency, and profound abuse of power disparities (between helpless captives and their captors). 

So when I make that comparison I’m not using rape as shorthand for Especially Awful Human Behavior. I’m not saying torture is like rape in the general sense that both are Really Bad. I’m saying that torture is like rape, in some very specific and fundamental ways, even in cases when it does not involve actual rape (because unfortunately there’s a lot of overlap).

Not that I think you needed that explained! We’re very much on the same page about this issue. But once you brought up the subject I realized that people might not read that comparison precisely the way I intended it, and thought it was important to clarify. Thanks for this very thoughtful response, it helped me articulate some things I was having a hard time with before. <3

[chamerionwrites]

I'm fucking tired mates. I am a thirty-something adult with two jobs, protests to attend, some relatively low-grade but persistent trauma that I'm still figuring out how to manage, and constant anxiety about the global rise of fascism. I understand that I'm not special in this regard and lots of other people are struggling too, which is why all I'm asking for is the level of courtesy and care that I try to extend to others.

TL;dr posts you read on the internet are written by real human people with lives and feelings. You should have the basic respect (and frankly self-respect) to try to make sure you understand them before replying, rather than getting insanely confrontational about things they never actually said because you were reading in the worst faith imaginable and/or saw three words you recognized and didn't read the rest at all and/or think you are the Protagonist Of The Internet and blanket assume everyone else is an NPC with zero interior life or original thoughts in their brain.

I swear to god this hellsite is absolutely teeming with people who can't wait to jump down the throat of someone who is on their side over a post that they didn't properly read

[chamerionwrites]

Me: I recognize that this is an immoderate way of stating my feelings, which is why it's an unrebloggable vent post, but on an emotional level it's hard sometimes not to wish the USA would simply burn to the ground and somebody would salt the ashes

Person Who Has Followed Me For Literal Years: Well actually *I* believe harmful systems can be reformed

Me: ...........Okay I appreciate that this is a single-sentence vent post and not an exhaustive treatise on my political beliefs, but. In context. A great deal of context, because again you've been following and commenting on my posts for literal years. Have I given the impression that I do not also believe this at ANY point in that time? And furthermore, do you really think it's helpful or kind to pick at someone's wording this way on a vent post where they're expressing fury and exhaustion and despair?

Them: I have a solution to this conflict, and it's called I'M NEVER SPEAKING TO YOU AGAIN

I swear to god this hellsite is absolutely teeming with people who can't wait to jump down the throat of someone who is on their side over a post that they didn't properly read