[ SECRET POST #2525 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #2525 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 03 pages, 063 secrets from Secret Submission Post #361.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Example: http://dilemmagoldman.tumblr.com/post/67003751847/i-am-here-for-marie-laveau-being-completely-unforgiving

[(Anonymous)]

That post scares me.

[(Anonymous)]

Wow. Those people are fucking insane.

[(Anonymous)]

Honestly this position doesn't bother me that much, and I might even kind of agree with it. At the very least, I'm willing to tentatively sign on to the notion that it's complex and hard to condemn it as simply evil. I think things like this usually are pretty complex.

"She clearly operates with Stokely Carmichael’s belief that, 'In order for non-violence to work, your opponent must have a conscience. The United States has none.' Y’all might not like what she does with that realization, but what she’s doing cannot be simplified into good and bad, right and wrong. The reality she’s working with is a lot deeper and a lot more complex than that." That's a position that seems, frankly, fairly perceptive and realistic, and certainly honest. It's hard for me to condemn that.

[(Anonymous)]

Innocent people. That would be as if your great grand father killed someone. And then their ancestors decided to kill you because of they were not able to kill him. It is a stupid position.

[(Anonymous)]

And considering the amount of wars in the last two centuries, just about everyone would have a reason to go on a killing spree, given that the possibilty that some ancestor killed another person's ancestor is pretty damn high.

I mean really, Germany would have to be nuked off the planet following that logic - along with at least two thirds of all other countries in the world.

[(Anonymous)]

I think this thread has mixed up "ancestors" and "descendants".

[(Anonymous)]

Yes, I'm pretty sure the show doesn't involve time traveling so the "ancestors' killing" isn't possible.

[(Anonymous)]

It seems to me that the position actually being taken - in the example - is less a defense of the morality of the specific actions, and more a defense of violent action against prejudice and wrong and protracted systems of injustice. Which I think is reasonable - I, frankly, don't have a problem with someone deciding that they're just not going to care about the details of the show and root for what they want to see, and I think in general that the question of violence as a reaction to violent oppression and the role that the past plays in that question, I think that question is a lot more complicated than people make out.

As a reaction to the specific actions in the show, is it justified? Probably not. But even given that, I don't think it's reasonable to describe this reaction as "insane", either - it is, to be honest, much more nuanced than I would expect from Tumblr. Maybe there's somewhere else where people are being crazy; I've only seen the one example.

[(Anonymous)]

Decendant.
Or is this some weird immortal thing?

[(Anonymous)]

Woops. someone already pointed it out. sorry.

[feotakahari]

I don't think that statement is correct. I believe in three, personally:

1. In order for non-violence to work, your opponents must not be DIRECTLY engaging in violence against you.

2. In order for non-violence to work, you must be working within a system in which you have access to free speech that isn't punished by violence.

3. Your opponents can and should be subdivided according to what exactly they're doing to you.

Violence is often the only response to someone who's trying to kill you. But if you kill someone who tells other people to kill you, you convince those other people that the person you killed was right to say you're a threat. And if you kill someone who isn't promoting violence against you, you ARE a threat. Your skin color is not material to that fact.

(Note that I'm not using the word "evil," because I don't consider it relevant. To go to the obvious extreme, there are still a few historians willing to argue the case that Hitler only exterminated the Jews because he thought they would exterminate the Germans if he didn't kill them first.)

[(Anonymous)]

I think those three conditions are what the description "has a conscience" is attempting to gloss.

But, again, I'm not so much defending the point as saying that it's not insane. Something that you disagree with =/= something insane.

[feotakahari]

If that was a gloss for all three, that would only make sense as saying that all white people in the United States are directly engaging in violence against black people. When laid out that way, that's an obviously nonsensical statement. But I see chains of "logic" laid out that use it as an implicit premise--they start with the explicit premise that all white people engage in racism*, they treat racism as a form of "violence," and then halfway through the argument they start talking as if all white people were going out and punching black people in the face, and making arguments that are proportional to that premise. I don't like the word "insane," but I feel like we need a word to describe self-breaking logic chains--"nonsensical," maybe?

*I'm not even gonna try to argue with that one, because racism is so embedded in American culture that I've even seen black people be racist towards black people.

[(Anonymous)]

I think "benefiting from, ignoring the existence of, and being somewhere between passively and actively hostile towards efforts to remedy racism and oppression" is the chain of logic, and I think the argument (on their side) is that this is enough to qualify as violence, in the sense that its effect is violent - whether the intention is the same or the action is the same as if every white person was going around punching every black person in the face, I think the argument is that if the result is the same, it merits some kind of response in that regard.

And I don't think that we do need a word, except "wrong." We disagree with them and think they're wrong. I don't think we need a special word to describe why they're wrong any more than we do in any other political situation. I mean, arguably, any political position you disagree with, insofar as you disagree with it, is going to have some gap in its chain of logic.

[feotakahari]

The first paragraph still doesn't feel acceptable to me, in that it doesn't feel like it creates the potential for violence to serve a purpose. Killing all white people is an impossibility, so if you're hurting white people just because you think all white people hurt black people, your violence won't bring about any form of social change. Suffering is not and can never be a meaningful end in itself, no matter who you're making suffer.

(To be clear, my argument is against attempts to justify suffering, not attempts to explain it. Taking out your pain on convenient targets is easy and popular--ultimately, it's the same impulse that drives poor white men who have no opportunities and no hope to go out and beat up black folks so they can feel better than someone for once.)

As for the second paragraph:

"I mean, arguably, any political position you disagree with, insofar as you disagree with it, is going to have some gap in its chain of logic."

This is not a true statement. Under reasonable circumstances, a position you disagree with is one that has premises you disagree with. If the conclusions follow logically from the premises, that's something you can discuss, argue with, and maybe even change someone's mind on. But if the conclusions don't follow logically from the premises, you can't even debate it, because discarding logic means there aren't any rules left to debate with. (For instance, this is why I've stopped trying to argue with white supremacists--they start with the conclusion that black people are inferior, but the premises they use to justify this can completely reverse from one sentence to the next, and they don't seem to realize they're changing anything.)

[(Anonymous)]

The first paragraph still doesn't feel acceptable to me, in that it doesn't feel like it creates the potential for violence to serve a purpose. Killing all white people is an impossibility, so if you're hurting white people just because you think all white people hurt black people, your violence won't bring about any form of social change. Suffering is not and can never be a meaningful end in itself, no matter who you're making suffer.

well I think the idea is precisely that it will create a possibility for change - it is, or at least it can be, a political action with political ends. Through (1) creating an awareness of the reality of violence and oppression which exists and the stakes surrounding the situation and (2) making the maintenance of the situation more costly and more painful and, ultimately, untenable for the powers that be. That's the idea behind it. I think, ultimately, that's the case however you define violence as a condition, and I think even if you disagree, there is a logic behind it. So it definitely can be something to bring about social change, and I think that it frequently has been, and I think there have been times where it has brought about social change.

This is not a true statement. Under reasonable circumstances, a position you disagree with is one that has premises you disagree with. If the conclusions follow logically from the premises, that's something you can discuss, argue with, and maybe even change someone's mind on. But if the conclusions don't follow logically from the premises, you can't even debate it, because discarding logic means there aren't any rules left to debate with.

I accept your point, with the caveat that it's often a tendentious question whether or not the conclusion does follow from the premises, so the circumstances where you can out-and-out say that the position is simply illogical are, I think, relatively small.

[(Anonymous)]

You have got to be shitting me. How would you like it if some dude from the future suddenly turned up telling you that he was going to kill your sister because her yet-to-be-born great-granddaughter murdered the guy's parents? "Perceptive, realistic, and honest"? There is no version of reality where "honesty" and "killing innocent people for sharing DNA with non-innocent people" come anywhere close to each other. Culpability does not work that way.

[(Anonymous)]

I mean, you know, I wouldn't agree with it, obviously. But I think I could understand where the impulse came from, if it was in the context of generations of oppression and violence. I agree that it doesn't make anyone culpable, but I also think that it's a little too simplistic to say that "Oh, they're just crazy." And I think it's more realistic to acknowledge that than to pretend it's simply insane. There is a reason on the side of violence even if it's ultimately wrong.

[feotakahari]

"To the last of their race" is generally the point where Western cultures stop trying to make vengeance okay. It's where Defarge lost her moral compass in A Tale of Two Cities, and revulsion against it was what made the Count regain his morality in The Count of Monte Cristo. I think a line needs to be drawn between explaining it and justifying it, and some of these comments feel way too close to justifying.

[(Anonymous)]

Well, there's a lot of complex lines to draw - there's the line between justifying and explaining, and I think there's also the fact that I'm defending someone else's justification of the actions more than the actions themselves. And there's also the line between political action to redress injustice, and political action to attain revenge. So I probably have strayed to close to the line, unfortunately; mea culpa, and all that. I do think that the explanation that I'm defending does move away from the specific actions of the show, and towards a defense of the use of political action to redress injustice, and that's part of what I'm defending.

Yeah. It's a complicated and tricky discussion to have and I apologize if my posts have not done justice to it, as I'm sure they've failed to do. Revenge, especially revenge "to the last of their race", isn't something that I want to defend and justify, ultimately.

[(Anonymous)]

Seriously. These people are fucking insane.

[(Anonymous)]

Hang on, are they straight-out grandfather-paradoxing here?

[(Anonymous)]

please half of white fandom would be rubbing their clits just thinking about a dude like that.

[(Anonymous)]

Right. Keep telling yourself that.