I think it’s largely a disagreement about who is fair game as a target for aggression. Even the “I think everyone should be kind to everyone at all times” crowd has their own share of unkindness, because their concept of kindness tends to revolve around interpersonal nonaggression rather than an empathetic validation of people’s experiences and feelings. In my experience, this emphasis on politeness over validation enables a lot of abusive dynamics. But it’s also a lot simpler to enforce and provides a pretty “objective” judge of correctness of behavior. If you’re focusing on validating people’s feelings, at least in a public forum, you run into many more zero sum games where by validating one person’s feelings, you invalidate another’s. This requires a more complete worldview to create an agreed upon set of standards for how those decisions are made.
In our case, we sacrifice the validation of our reactionary impulses for the sake of making the space more comfortable for the more vulnerable among us. We see this not only as a righteous tradeoff but also as a cornerstone of the culture we enjoy here. The casual support of marginalized people goes hand in hand with the chill vibe when we’re amongst ourselves.
The inverse of this is that we are critical of others just as we are critical of ourselves. For most people, it’s the pushback against criticism rather than the criticism itself that causes the real friction. Ability to self-crit is paramount to thriving here, and it’s a skill that is generally taught in a very toxic way for most people in the west. Criticism is used interchangeably with deprecation, when targeted at others as well as the self. So we draw a distinction there between deprecation and criticism and do our best to take a step back.
I know we’ve been rowdy with all the federation discourse, but people often fail to see the distinction between us being aggressive in the face of bigotry, us being invested in criticisms we’re facing, and us not taking the situation seriously or respectfully. I’m not saying the latter never happens. But it’s much less common than the first two situations.
Boy howdy. I’m still changing how I speak, what, six years in to the great hexbear experience? I’ve mostly stopped using “stupid” and i’m trying to replace mental health words as insults as much as possible.
I think it’s largely a disagreement about who is fair game as a target for aggression. Even the “I think everyone should be kind to everyone at all times” crowd has their own share of unkindness, because their concept of kindness tends to revolve around interpersonal nonaggression rather than an empathetic validation of people’s experiences and feelings. In my experience, this emphasis on politeness over validation enables a lot of abusive dynamics. But it’s also a lot simpler to enforce and provides a pretty “objective” judge of correctness of behavior. If you’re focusing on validating people’s feelings, at least in a public forum, you run into many more zero sum games where by validating one person’s feelings, you invalidate another’s. This requires a more complete worldview to create an agreed upon set of standards for how those decisions are made.
In our case, we sacrifice the validation of our reactionary impulses for the sake of making the space more comfortable for the more vulnerable among us. We see this not only as a righteous tradeoff but also as a cornerstone of the culture we enjoy here. The casual support of marginalized people goes hand in hand with the chill vibe when we’re amongst ourselves.
The inverse of this is that we are critical of others just as we are critical of ourselves. For most people, it’s the pushback against criticism rather than the criticism itself that causes the real friction. Ability to self-crit is paramount to thriving here, and it’s a skill that is generally taught in a very toxic way for most people in the west. Criticism is used interchangeably with deprecation, when targeted at others as well as the self. So we draw a distinction there between deprecation and criticism and do our best to take a step back.
I know we’ve been rowdy with all the federation discourse, but people often fail to see the distinction between us being aggressive in the face of bigotry, us being invested in criticisms we’re facing, and us not taking the situation seriously or respectfully. I’m not saying the latter never happens. But it’s much less common than the first two situations.
Boy howdy. I’m still changing how I speak, what, six years in to the great hexbear experience? I’ve mostly stopped using “stupid” and i’m trying to replace mental health words as insults as much as possible.
Same here. The reality is that it’s a slow process, but well worth the little changes.