More comments I posted to other people's journals and blogs and wanted to save:
On a Captain Awkward post, a comment on the phrasing "blood is thicker than water": Regardless of “real” or “original” meanings, that’s one of those arguments that makes me think, Is that the best reason than you can give? OK, so it’s harder to separate from relatives than from unrelated friends, but is that the only reason to want to spend time with these people? Not “we know and understand each other” or “we take care of each other” or “I like them” but “we’re stuck together by shared bodily fluids”?
It’s like defending a statement because, legally, you had the right to make it: if that’s your best or only argument, you’re admitting that you can’t defend what you said as true, useful, or interesting.
Digressive response to something![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
steepholm wrote about removing statues of abhorrent people":
My alma mater just renamed one of its residential colleges, to honor Admiral Grace Hopper instead of the pro-slavery politician John C. Calhoun. People who were affiliated with it pre-2016 have the option of identifying with the college by either name. Hopper stands out obviously as the only woman they've named one after, and not quite as obviously as the most recent by several decades, which makes sense because the other names were chosen in the 1930s. There was of course quite a bit of argument, but I noticed that it was all "tradition" and "we shouldn't deny history," but they didn't exactly try to teach us who Calhoun: what I had at the time was the factoid "first man to resign as vice president," and I didn't get that from Yale, I got it from coming to political awareness around the time Spiro Agnew became the second.
Thinking about the list of namesakes for Yale colleges, it's mostly people and places few people outside the university has heard of: Timothy Dwight and Ezra Stiles were presidents of Yale, and Saybrook and Branford are towns in Connecticut. The famous end is Samuel Morse, Jonathan Edwards, and Bishop Berkeley. From a historical angle, it's not so much "these people deserve honor" or "were important to the university" as, maybe, "here are bits of the university's history." From that angle, the nonexistent plaque ought to say "on this spot, Yale University chose to honor the legacy of slavery from the 1930s until 2016." Others might say things like "this college is named in honor of a classical scholar who was president of Yale" and "a Christian preacher who was part of the Great Awakening." (If you still have no idea what I'm referring to, that's pre-Revolution American cultural/religious history.)
In response to a locked entry by a friend who said that there was a lot going on in the world, and referred to not posting about it in her journal as "failing":
It's worth documenting our own lives, but the larger historical chronicles are there whether we link to them explicitly in our own diaries, letters, and blogs or not. If some hypothetical future historian looks at my DW journal or old Usenet posts, or gets their hands on my journals when I'm safely dead, they can connect the dots for time and events outside my personal life. (If I was worried about that sort of chronicle, I wouldn't add things about Hurricane Irma or large-scale political stuff to my entries; the addenda would be "talked to Mom, she has a new design of hearing aid and they need to be adjusted before her next trip" and a "dramatis personae" list.)
kaberett made an interesting post about "hating one's body and love as praxis". And I said:
It feels like there's a range of stuff grouped under "body positivity," from "believe your body is wonderful" to "find things you like about your body" to "don't hate yourself because your body is imperfect." And even if someone wants all those things, I suspect different approaches work for each.
"This is a good body because it has me in it" is body-positive, but says nothing about most of the things we judge bodies on: it's an approach that works for any or no gender, any age, any set of physical skills, disability, age, race, weight...
That's a very different approach than "it doesn't matter what race you are or how much you weigh, you can make yourself attractive," which can wind up back with women expected to be pretty, and make some effort toward that, as rent for living in the world.
I suspect (though I may not be best-situated to analyze this) that the "love your body" messages women/female-presenting people get are significantly different from the ones that male-presenting people get. Logically, if loving my body includes doing nice things for it, that includes the flu shot that means I'm less likely to suffer fever and muscle aches, at least as much as it includes adornments like makeup, tattoos, or pretty clothing.
In response tojack, who posted about his tendency to agree with people shouting at him:
One possibility would be to try to calm the person down and maybe even give them what they want then and there, but work on not automatically updating the rest of your brain to believe that they must have been right. (That work in turn might be something you can do on your own, over time, or might benefit from working with a therapist.) This is where suggestions to tell people something like "yes, that sucks, what are you going to do about it?" come in. It's a way for the person being yelled at, or asked to sympathize with the same person for the same problem for the tenth time, to neither argue nor take responsibility for the problem.
Not updating your brain/beliefs that way might mean, not automatically ignoring the issue, but thinking about whether the person's anger was appropriate, and if so whether their anger was legitimately at you, or if their problem was for some other reason a thing it was reasonable to expect you to deal with.
Consider people who shout at low-level customer service staff: maybe the airline really has messed up, but the person at the counter didn't cause the problem and can't fix the policies, only at best help this one customer. Or maybe the shouter is unhappy because they got stuck in traffic, but the clerk isn't allowed to say "you should have left work sooner, not assumed you'd be able to get here in ten minutes at five o'clock." Also, some of those shouters have genuinely lost their tempers, while others have been told that yelling will get them what they want and calm politeness won't. But you can't tell Alice, who is angry at you, from Bob who is angry at his boss and yelling at you because it's safer, or Charlie who is yelling as a calculated tactic.
Also: trusting someone when they tell you about something they're really angry or passionate about is usually a good thing, but to some extent that depends on who it is. I'd trust [personal profile] liv further than I would trust a random neighbor I just met at the bus stop, and you'd probably trust her even more than I would.
Trusting someone in this context includes believing that they are honest (rather than pretending to be angry to manipulate me); believing that they're not mistaken about what they're saying; and believing that what they want me to do about the problem is a good idea.
Responding toconuly's comment about learning Spanish, on a post by the_siobhan about how she was, or wasn't, taught French in Ontario:
We got mostly Castilian (in my New York City school in the 1970s). I didn't notice anything odd at the time, because the only things written in Spanish that I wanted to read (i.e., not textbooks) were the poems of Pablo Neruda, and his Spanish was close to what I had learned.
Fortunately, when I started living in upper Manhattan in the late '80s, my Dominican neighbors were willing to meet me halfway, or more than halfway. Later, I understood the long telenovela PSA saga of Juan and Marisol, and could mostly understand El Diario/La Prensa, though my actually buying a copy, not just reading the headlines on other commuters' newspapers, surprised the man at the bodega downstairs. (The headline was about Subcommandante Marcos and the rebellion in Chiapas, and I knew there wouldn't be significant coverage in the local English-language papers).
On a Captain Awkward post, a comment on the phrasing "blood is thicker than water": Regardless of “real” or “original” meanings, that’s one of those arguments that makes me think, Is that the best reason than you can give? OK, so it’s harder to separate from relatives than from unrelated friends, but is that the only reason to want to spend time with these people? Not “we know and understand each other” or “we take care of each other” or “I like them” but “we’re stuck together by shared bodily fluids”?
It’s like defending a statement because, legally, you had the right to make it: if that’s your best or only argument, you’re admitting that you can’t defend what you said as true, useful, or interesting.
Digressive response to something
steepholm wrote about removing statues of abhorrent people":My alma mater just renamed one of its residential colleges, to honor Admiral Grace Hopper instead of the pro-slavery politician John C. Calhoun. People who were affiliated with it pre-2016 have the option of identifying with the college by either name. Hopper stands out obviously as the only woman they've named one after, and not quite as obviously as the most recent by several decades, which makes sense because the other names were chosen in the 1930s. There was of course quite a bit of argument, but I noticed that it was all "tradition" and "we shouldn't deny history," but they didn't exactly try to teach us who Calhoun: what I had at the time was the factoid "first man to resign as vice president," and I didn't get that from Yale, I got it from coming to political awareness around the time Spiro Agnew became the second.
Thinking about the list of namesakes for Yale colleges, it's mostly people and places few people outside the university has heard of: Timothy Dwight and Ezra Stiles were presidents of Yale, and Saybrook and Branford are towns in Connecticut. The famous end is Samuel Morse, Jonathan Edwards, and Bishop Berkeley. From a historical angle, it's not so much "these people deserve honor" or "were important to the university" as, maybe, "here are bits of the university's history." From that angle, the nonexistent plaque ought to say "on this spot, Yale University chose to honor the legacy of slavery from the 1930s until 2016." Others might say things like "this college is named in honor of a classical scholar who was president of Yale" and "a Christian preacher who was part of the Great Awakening." (If you still have no idea what I'm referring to, that's pre-Revolution American cultural/religious history.)
In response to a locked entry by a friend who said that there was a lot going on in the world, and referred to not posting about it in her journal as "failing":
It's worth documenting our own lives, but the larger historical chronicles are there whether we link to them explicitly in our own diaries, letters, and blogs or not. If some hypothetical future historian looks at my DW journal or old Usenet posts, or gets their hands on my journals when I'm safely dead, they can connect the dots for time and events outside my personal life. (If I was worried about that sort of chronicle, I wouldn't add things about Hurricane Irma or large-scale political stuff to my entries; the addenda would be "talked to Mom, she has a new design of hearing aid and they need to be adjusted before her next trip" and a "dramatis personae" list.)
kaberett made an interesting post about "hating one's body and love as praxis". And I said:It feels like there's a range of stuff grouped under "body positivity," from "believe your body is wonderful" to "find things you like about your body" to "don't hate yourself because your body is imperfect." And even if someone wants all those things, I suspect different approaches work for each.
"This is a good body because it has me in it" is body-positive, but says nothing about most of the things we judge bodies on: it's an approach that works for any or no gender, any age, any set of physical skills, disability, age, race, weight...
That's a very different approach than "it doesn't matter what race you are or how much you weigh, you can make yourself attractive," which can wind up back with women expected to be pretty, and make some effort toward that, as rent for living in the world.
I suspect (though I may not be best-situated to analyze this) that the "love your body" messages women/female-presenting people get are significantly different from the ones that male-presenting people get. Logically, if loving my body includes doing nice things for it, that includes the flu shot that means I'm less likely to suffer fever and muscle aches, at least as much as it includes adornments like makeup, tattoos, or pretty clothing.
In response to
jack, who posted about his tendency to agree with people shouting at him:One possibility would be to try to calm the person down and maybe even give them what they want then and there, but work on not automatically updating the rest of your brain to believe that they must have been right. (That work in turn might be something you can do on your own, over time, or might benefit from working with a therapist.) This is where suggestions to tell people something like "yes, that sucks, what are you going to do about it?" come in. It's a way for the person being yelled at, or asked to sympathize with the same person for the same problem for the tenth time, to neither argue nor take responsibility for the problem.
Not updating your brain/beliefs that way might mean, not automatically ignoring the issue, but thinking about whether the person's anger was appropriate, and if so whether their anger was legitimately at you, or if their problem was for some other reason a thing it was reasonable to expect you to deal with.
Consider people who shout at low-level customer service staff: maybe the airline really has messed up, but the person at the counter didn't cause the problem and can't fix the policies, only at best help this one customer. Or maybe the shouter is unhappy because they got stuck in traffic, but the clerk isn't allowed to say "you should have left work sooner, not assumed you'd be able to get here in ten minutes at five o'clock." Also, some of those shouters have genuinely lost their tempers, while others have been told that yelling will get them what they want and calm politeness won't. But you can't tell Alice, who is angry at you, from Bob who is angry at his boss and yelling at you because it's safer, or Charlie who is yelling as a calculated tactic.
Also: trusting someone when they tell you about something they're really angry or passionate about is usually a good thing, but to some extent that depends on who it is. I'd trust [personal profile] liv further than I would trust a random neighbor I just met at the bus stop, and you'd probably trust her even more than I would.
Trusting someone in this context includes believing that they are honest (rather than pretending to be angry to manipulate me); believing that they're not mistaken about what they're saying; and believing that what they want me to do about the problem is a good idea.
Responding to
conuly's comment about learning Spanish, on a post by the_siobhan about how she was, or wasn't, taught French in Ontario:We got mostly Castilian (in my New York City school in the 1970s). I didn't notice anything odd at the time, because the only things written in Spanish that I wanted to read (i.e., not textbooks) were the poems of Pablo Neruda, and his Spanish was close to what I had learned.
Fortunately, when I started living in upper Manhattan in the late '80s, my Dominican neighbors were willing to meet me halfway, or more than halfway. Later, I understood the long telenovela PSA saga of Juan and Marisol, and could mostly understand El Diario/La Prensa, though my actually buying a copy, not just reading the headlines on other commuters' newspapers, surprised the man at the bodega downstairs. (The headline was about Subcommandante Marcos and the rebellion in Chiapas, and I knew there wouldn't be significant coverage in the local English-language papers).
From:
no subject
I have always hated "blood is thicker than water," as if somehow there was no substance to the bonds between unrelated people. I like your framing.
I also like your comments on body positivity. s.e. smith was the person who first made it clear to me that "love your body" can be oppressive, and many people have given much thought to it since then, all of it valuable.
From:
no subject