Gaywallet's recent activity
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Comment on Proposal: For sensitive topics, if a thread is intended for a particular demographic, there needs another thread open for everyone to discuss without having to join the targeted thread in ~tildes
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Comment on Proposal: For sensitive topics, if a thread is intended for a particular demographic, there needs another thread open for everyone to discuss without having to join the targeted thread in ~tildes
Gaywallet Link ParentI'm specifically responding to what the poster here said, which was the following: I'm not speaking about other groups here. I'm also not particularly interested in discussing the merits of...I think assuming fragility on behalf of someone who responds to bait is making a pretty big assumption.
I'm specifically responding to what the poster here said, which was the following:
But at the same time, saying that "all men" are the problem does put a lot of people in a position where they can either look around and say "yeah, I can see that this is happening, thanks for pointing it out", or they can look around and say "I don't see this". There are people who are legitimately in the latter group, and there are people who are wilfully ignorant and place themselves in that group.
When they place "blame" on people in the latter group, it will immediately make them defensive, because they're being accused of either being a terrible person, or enabling terrible people, and both of those have been deemed by the speaker to be basically the same.
I'm not speaking about other groups here. I'm also not particularly interested in discussing the merits of whether this helps or drives people away. I simply wanted to point out that making the logical leaps I detailed is explicitly fragility, and it's what drives a fair share of the gut emotional reaction kind of responses that these discussions are often fraught with.
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Comment on Proposal: For sensitive topics, if a thread is intended for a particular demographic, there needs another thread open for everyone to discuss without having to join the targeted thread in ~tildes
Gaywallet Link ParentPerfect! Then you're not the person I'm describing here. You didn't make the jumps in logic necessary to end up in the incorrect place. You're clearly not fragile, as you're confident enough in...I am confident enough about my own irl behavior that an accusation from an online rando who lives on the opposite side of the planet usually doesn't directly affect me, but I still care about it and will respond because I think it's bad for society to say things like that and it only serves to make cultural conflicts worse.
Perfect! Then you're not the person I'm describing here. You didn't make the jumps in logic necessary to end up in the incorrect place. You're clearly not fragile, as you're confident enough in yourself and your behavior to understand when a blanket statement about a group you belong to doesn't mean it's an accusation about you.
I'm not sure if I understand your "all women are sluts" example
I condensed a complicated subject down to a very short explanation. In short I essentially broke down a statement about men, turned it into it's logical structure "all x are y", then disassembled what the statement truly means and gave examples of other "all x are y" statements. Because I was talking about the group of all of these statements, I threw in some examples which were sit on the various edges (local extremes) to explain the limits of this statement. To be clear, these other examples are not meant to be stand-ins or analogous to a statement such as "all men in tech are misogynist" (which to be clear the woman in the video never stated) which I was trying to explain here. My goal was not to provide an analogous statement here so much as it was to break down the general logic of a statement like this, explain why a gut emotional response of defense is not necessary because it is a misunderstanding of the statement itself.
Does that help explain it? I'm not sure I've the energy or time to go into this in more detail, but hopefully a high level explanation of the train of thought here helps.
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Comment on Proposal: For sensitive topics, if a thread is intended for a particular demographic, there needs another thread open for everyone to discuss without having to join the targeted thread in ~tildes
Gaywallet Link ParentI'm talking about and introducing the idea of fragility and I'm doing so by injecting some helpful advice right up front (don't immediately assume "all x are y" means you are y if you are a part...I'm talking about and introducing the idea of fragility and I'm doing so by injecting some helpful advice right up front (don't immediately assume "all x are y" means you are y if you are a part of group x). If the mere use of the word "fragility" as a concept applied to help explain why people often exhibit a particular behavior is enough to scare someone off from reading about fragility, then they aren't ready for the topic anyway.
I'm not particularly interested in debating semantics of "best wording" to get people to do things. That way lies madness. I'm simply introducing the concept here because it's relevant and might help at least one person.
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Comment on Proposal: For sensitive topics, if a thread is intended for a particular demographic, there needs another thread open for everyone to discuss without having to join the targeted thread in ~tildes
Gaywallet (edited )Link ParentWhat I'm talking about is to help people who have a gut reaction to any "all x are y" statements where they share group x. The goal here is to interrupt the fast emotional response that fragile...If that's a person's immediate reaction to the slogan, then it's undermining itself before anyone has heard its message.
What I'm talking about is to help people who have a gut reaction to any "all x are y" statements where they share group x. The goal here is to interrupt the fast emotional response that fragile people tend to have, where their thought process is essentially:
- They said all men are rapists.
- I'm a man.
- Therefore they are accusing me of being a rapist.
- But wait, I'm not a rapist!
- I must defend myself
This is fragility, for the reasons I outlined. The deeper point of whether they are a man who is contributing to rape culture has yet to be explored and cannot be determined at that point because either they are the problem and lying to themselves, or they have not been exposed to the information which informs them of a new perspective, insight, or knowledge that explains how they are contributing to the problem.
So in that sense I disagree - it's not undermining itself before the message has been heard. It's a true statement at that point in time to the listener. It may not be an objectively true statement, but the goal here is to get someone to listen rather than getting defensive, so we probably shouldn't quibble over the semantics of the exact wording here (especially when the statement "all men are rapists" also suffers from the same issue of semantics).
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Comment on Proposal: For sensitive topics, if a thread is intended for a particular demographic, there needs another thread open for everyone to discuss without having to join the targeted thread in ~tildes
Gaywallet Link ParentNo, this is fragility. When someone says "all women are sluts", I recognize immediately two things: They aren't talking about literally every woman. If you stop and press them and ask them if...When they place "blame" on people in the latter group, it will immediately make them defensive, because they're being accused of either being a terrible person, or enabling terrible people, and both of those have been deemed by the speaker to be basically the same.
No, this is fragility.
When someone says "all women are sluts", I recognize immediately two things:
- They aren't talking about literally every woman. If you stop and press them and ask them if their mom is a slut? Their sister? Their wife? Saint Mary? There will always be at least one exception
- They aren't talking about me. Doesn't matter if it's women and sluts, men and rapists, cops are bad, black people and thievery, romani people being untrustworthy, or whatever combination of <group> and <characteristic> where I happen to be a part of <group>. It's a generalization, sometimes based in hate, sometimes based in experience. Sometimes its legitimately a problem with society or a group that needs to be raised. Other times it's based in hate or hurt. Regardless, the statement is never literally true (it can't be with 8 billion people) - it's a statement meant to start a conversation about what lies beneath - the pattern or experience or symptom that corrupts what they perceive to be as enough of the group to constitute "all".
Taking it literally means you either haven't stopped and thought about these kinds of statements for long enough to recognize that they aren't literal (most speech isn't, by the way... food for thought) or that you are fragile enough to think it applies to you even when there's evidence it doesn't (stop defending male rapists if you're a man when someone says this. it's not necessary). As an aside, if anyone reading this hasn't read the book White Fragility by Dr. Robin DiAngelo, I would recommend picking up this book to explore the concept of fragility more.
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Comment on Non-queer men of Tildes: PLEASE consider before commenting on ~life.women and ~lgbt without careful consideration. We are losing members over this issue. in ~tildes
Gaywallet Link ParentHonestly it had never occurred to me, this is a great perspective.Honestly it had never occurred to me, this is a great perspective.
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Comment on #YesAllMen #NotAllMen #MaybeSomeMen How to be better? in ~life.men
Gaywallet Link ParentThis and every thread in a nutshell, sadly.This is also why I didn't watch the video
This and every thread in a nutshell, sadly.
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Comment on #YesAllMen #NotAllMen #MaybeSomeMen How to be better? in ~life.men
Gaywallet Link ParentI really don't think her talk was aimed at the folks who are causing the problem, but rather for folks who are already allies looking for tangible ways they can effect things. There's different...I think we get so wrapped up in the message we forget that the people who need to hear it don’t want to hear it.
I really don't think her talk was aimed at the folks who are causing the problem, but rather for folks who are already allies looking for tangible ways they can effect things.
There's different audiences for every talk - the folks who need to hear this sort of stuff to change their behavior likely need to hear it from a conservative man that they already look up to (the Joe Rogans and such of the world) and needs to be spoon fed to them so as to avoid triggering their fragility.
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Comment on Non-queer men of Tildes: PLEASE consider before commenting on ~life.women and ~lgbt without careful consideration. We are losing members over this issue. in ~tildes
Gaywallet Link ParentFor what it's worth, I think it's entirely appropriate for 1-2 comment trees to exist that are simply along the lines of 'hey, I'm not the group being discussed here, but I read/watched what was...For what it's worth, I think it's entirely appropriate for 1-2 comment trees to exist that are simply along the lines of 'hey, I'm not the group being discussed here, but I read/watched what was posted here and just want to share my sympathy'. I think it's also reasonable to ask yourself the hard questions when you see these - introspect a little about whether you're contributing to or alleviating the problem on a societal level (don't allow yourself the cop-out of 'no-effect', really consider whether it's on one side or the other) and how you can continue to move in the direction of improvement... think about a time where you did contribute to the problem or alleviate it.
Sharing these experiences and reflecting I think is fine, so long as you're paying attention to not trying to dominate the conversation. Keep it in a single comment thread or wait to post it if none of the affected folks have chimed in it or enough time has passed since it was posted.
Finally, if you see men doing the behavior described in this post - step in right away. Take that off the affected minority's plate and call out the toxic behavior for what it is. Don't necessarily engage in "debating" them so much as judging them negatively and sharing what they're doing in a contextual level. Ask them to read the room and tell them you are disappointed in their behavior, help them understand how it's contributing to the problem, but also don't engage so much that it takes up the whole convo.
Oh yeah, and in case it isn't clear - thanks for posting this. It's nice to see friendly voices chiming in asking how they can help.
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Comment on Non-queer men of Tildes: PLEASE consider before commenting on ~life.women and ~lgbt without careful consideration. We are losing members over this issue. in ~tildes
Gaywallet LinkI hate to beat this drum literally every time the wheel completes another cycle, but this exact problem (although not just limited to women, I saw it happen with other minorities especially poc...I hate to beat this drum literally every time the wheel completes another cycle, but this exact problem (although not just limited to women, I saw it happen with other minorities especially poc and trans) has never been resolved on Tildes, and is unfortunately just going to continue to happen without any sort of moderation which Deimos made extremely clear isn't going to happen.
For what it's worth, I agree with you and wish people would be more mindful, but we shouldn't expect more out of this website - that's a path that leads to disappointment or a really long temporary ban for causing too much trouble, lol.
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Comment on Best way to setup email forwarding for a domain I own? in ~tech
Gaywallet LinkMxroute runs promotional lifetime 5gb total space with unlimited email creation from time to time. I have that set up with my custom domain. I use my custom email boxes primarily for...Mxroute runs promotional lifetime 5gb total space with unlimited email creation from time to time. I have that set up with my custom domain. I use my custom email boxes primarily for spam/signup/single accounts so space isn't a huge deal to me.
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Comment on Maybe there was an egg cartel after all in ~food
Gaywallet LinkI remember thinking that "we're in for a lot more of this" when oil prices spiked in the early 00s and congress did absolutely nothing about it. Since then we've seen price collusion kinda go...I remember thinking that "we're in for a lot more of this" when oil prices spiked in the early 00s and congress did absolutely nothing about it. Since then we've seen price collusion kinda go rampant. I wonder if we'll learn, at all, from this? Probably not, given that the administrative state is being dismantled as we speak and poop lettuce is becoming the norm.
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Comment on The people holding up the internet in ~tech
Gaywallet Link Parentoop, search function borked out on me... will deleteoop, search function borked out on me... will delete
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Comment on On US Democrats who cave in response to anti-trans attack ads in ~lgbt
Gaywallet Link ParentSadly this was true until they became squarely in the crosshairs of the republican party. Since that's happened public perception has gone down, as has perception of all queer identities (we've...Is this a case where people who are trans becoming part of typical public consciousness and culture will gradually erode those bigoted feelings from most people, much like lesbian and gay people have over recent decades?
Sadly this was true until they became squarely in the crosshairs of the republican party. Since that's happened public perception has gone down, as has perception of all queer identities (we've gone measurably backwards on gay rights/acceptance). In general public perception has trended downwards since every marginalized group got targeted by the right (black perception post BLM, as another notable example), but I do wonder on some level how much of that is because the left has backpedaled significantly or softened on a ton of issues.
I believe that the polarization of the right and the mainstreamification of the radical ideas has directly lead to harm to every marginalized group and my hypothesis is that it is because folks are no longer willing to socially isolate individuals with radical opinions, or rather the window for what is considered acceptable has shifted because we've given an outsized voice to a hateful vocal minority (white nationalists) allowing breathing room to those with ideas that would normally get them ostracized and pushed out of social groups. If you've ever read the book how minds change by David McRaney, there's a portion of it where he examines the literature on how public perception changes and the most plausible academic framework put forward as to why it takes a long time to move much but then changes swiftly is a model in which it's done via social stigmatization - when a problematic view is held by a small enough portion of a social group it becomes reasonable to exclude that voice for causing harm but this can only happen when that group is small enough. By forcing a public debate in which we give platforms to a vocal hatemongering minority we give the perception that it's an "accepted" or "okay" viewpoint to have and it emboldens those who have those opinions and encourages others to fall in line or discuss it like it's valid if they lean in that direction. It gives social "capital" to the idea and poisons the well.
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On US Democrats who cave in response to anti-trans attack ads
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Comment on Luigi Mangione pleads guilty to federal stalking charges in the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO in ~news
Gaywallet Link ParentI agree with 99% of what you're saying here (hello fellow medical professional), but I have to note that UHG is a publicly traded, explicitly for-profit company. Their financials tell you...insurers are unfortunately a solution rather than a problem
I agree with 99% of what you're saying here (hello fellow medical professional), but I have to note that UHG is a publicly traded, explicitly for-profit company. Their financials tell you everything you need to know about just how "zero-sum" this particular company is. There's a huge difference between how UHG operates and how medicare or medicaid operate. The government isn't looking to make a profit off health insurance, but UHG most definitely is and some of the deplorable policies you mentioned are a direct cause of that, no matter who you attribute the "blame" to.
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Comment on Luigi Mangione pleads guilty to federal stalking charges in the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO in ~news
Gaywallet Link ParentTo add on to what @DefinitelyNotAFae said, and because I don't see this being mentioned elsewhere, there's a few additional factors we should consider when we consider morality. First and...- Exemplary
To add on to what @DefinitelyNotAFae said, and because I don't see this being mentioned elsewhere, there's a few additional factors we should consider when we consider morality.
First and foremost, what is considered moral is often a game of weighing pros and cons. Think of the classic killing baby Hitler question - It's a hypothetical in which we know the outcome if baby Hitler lives. You can draw parallels to the Trolley problem and optimizing for minimal harm, but regardless of the reasoning it's clear that to at least some people the "morality" of something is often a form of calculus.
This is further supported by ideas like "we cannot be tolerant of the intolerant." The conditions, also known as the premise, are critically important for both logical and emotional arguments. In the logical state, they are used to reason towards an answer. For the emotional state, they are often what creates the emotion in the first place that someone is reacting to.
On the logical side, whether Luigi did something good or bad is largely a function of the premise itself. If we start from a premise that "society is functioning correctly and law and order are good things which allow society to function" it might be easy to reach the conclusion that the killing is immoral on the grounds of disrupting this system. However, if we start from the premise of "society is not functioning correctly and law and order are sometimes used by evil people to corrupt society" it might be equally easy to reach the conclusion that killing people indiscriminately is not a good thing but this particular killing might be justified on some grounds because it has removed someone who is corrupting/damaging society.
On the emotional side, the premise is more a function of the people involved. Lets take an extreme and start from the premise of someone who is a billionaire - they are in control of society, benefiting from society the way it is set up, and the killing of someone of their class represents an existential threat to their way of life. It would be easy to see how emotionally they would be strongly against this killing. On the other end, we may have individuals who have personally been effected by the system - perhaps having been crippled by medical negligence that was a direct effect of policies that this CEO put in place. It would be trivial to imagine a situation in which they are strongly in favor of this killing. I suspect most people fall somewhere between these two extremes, either critical or in support of the existing status quo, primarily a function of how much the status quo privileges them.
One other thing to note here is that for most people, morality is not universalist in the way you are suggesting here. Besides the broader societal/structural premises weighing heavily into the calculus of whether a specific action is moral rather than the universalist position of the action itself being moral, most humans also weigh their own personal gain as well as their audience into functions of morality. There was a fascinating study on morality where they compared neurotypical to autistic individuals where they created a set of "good context" and a "bad context" moral choices, and manipulated the personal premises (personal gain/loss and whether there was an audience) to see whether people would shift their moral compass based on these premises. While autistic people were more likely to take universalist stances on "bad context" moral choices and were less likely to care about whether there was an audience, both groups changed behavior in the "good context" based on personal gain/loss, indicating that personal reputation and the visibility of an action change how people conduct moral calculus and determine whether something is moral or immoral.
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Comment on Is there any interest in building a Tildes successor? in ~tildes
Gaywallet Link ParentI mean I think it's worth revisiting with the currently engaged leadership on Beehaw - I'm generally in agreement based on what I've seen at this point. But I see membership being an issue if we...I mean I think it's worth revisiting with the currently engaged leadership on Beehaw - I'm generally in agreement based on what I've seen at this point. But I see membership being an issue if we aren't federated and we don't have folks who are really dedicated to spreading the word to the right spaces. I don't have that kind of capacity, but that doesn't mean there aren't others who do.
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Comment on Is there any interest in building a Tildes successor? in ~tildes
Gaywallet Link ParentThere are still issues with Lemmy and the developer's vision, but without a strong team who's willing to migrate us off to another platform which would be it's own potential issue (needs to be...There are still issues with Lemmy and the developer's vision, but without a strong team who's willing to migrate us off to another platform which would be it's own potential issue (needs to be attached to the fediverse but with better choices on permissions of offsite platforms/sites) I don't see us moving to any new platform anytime soon.
We've investigated a few Lemmy alternatives which are still on the fediverse, but none of them have truly come to fruition yet - seemingly stuck in development forever.
To be clear, I wasn't trying to weigh in at all about whether it's the right way to do anything. I'm simply exposing that fragility drives the explicit situation detailed here. There's plenty of nuance to unpack in a larger discussion about how to reach the problematic men in tech highlighted by the original video, but that wasn't the point of this reply.