this is not a point that will translate well into tweets probably, but generally i think people's relationship to the concept of "why" a thing happens - causes - is weirdly fucked in a way that i have trouble concisely pointing to
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like - you can imagine a big-ass causal network of reasons things happen - X happens because Y, Z, W because Y1, Y2, Z1, Z2, Z3, W1, etc. etc. - and laying out the whole network is costly and confusing so in practice we single a node out somehow and stop there
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in public discourse depressingly often people ask "why thing bad?" and traverse the network until they get to "ahh, because outgroup bad," raucous applause from ingroup, but does not go far enough imo - even to the extent that it's true... why outgroup bad???
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ex: common tactic in feminist discourse to traverse the network until you get to "because men bad," but... why men bad??? i don't dispute the point, many men are awful in many ways, but haven't you ever gotten curious about why???
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(some hints:)
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Replying to @SpaceXponential @maybegray and @TylerAlterman
i was just reading the beginning of richard schwartz's "you are the one you've been waiting for" and he says some very relevant stuff, better than i could say it:
ifsca.ca/wp-content/upl
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the problem, obviously, is that if you ask "why outgroup bad?" and actually try to find out, and get an answer sympathetic to outgroup, that would be... bad, right? this is the kind of insane group dynamic that keeps people trapped in their thinking forever
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the really depressing bit about this dynamic to me is that ofc a big thing that draws people to feminism is traumatic experiences of being hurt by men, and imo part of healing from those experiences is understanding men in enough detail to really get *why* they did it
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(someone really just tweeted this out recently:)
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Most young women who experience rape only recover when they accept that the rape was actually nothing personal, because the attacker was incapable of loving attachment and did not view them or anyone else as a human and only as an object.
Most are shocked, then relieved.
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which is to say, the feminist group dynamic where understanding men in positive compassionate terms is implicitly (or explicitly who knows) viewed as a betrayal, is actively *preventing* a part of the healing process
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There's some kind of awful toxoplasmosis life cycle thing going on with trauma and ideology. Trauma begets ideologies to make sense of it, and those ideologies form communities in which everyone is actually actively reinforcing each other's trauma, I think in several ways. Oof.
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and i maybe picked a regrettably spicy example but the spiciness is an important part of the dynamic - this stuff feels scary to talk about, i've heard similar from many other people of various genders (in *private*), and that scariness is part of what keeps the dynamic going
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primary motivation is to rid the subjective world of nonsensical suffering. The goal isn’t to remove suffering, but rather find a story to explain it that doesn’t change. Have to brave the valley of narrative-less evil to fix things.