#Epistemic Injustice

[taliabhattwrites]

The Third Sex

After months of research and painstakingly connecting the threads of transmisogyny theory, queer activism, and field-wide epistemic injustice, I would like to present "The Third Sex": my treatise on a third-world transfeminism.

[librarycards]

When I go onstage, I usually joke a lot. I joke on purpose, first of all because I want to believe I’m funny. But there’s another reason: Any Palestinians operating in the public eye, especially Palestinians who have suffered Israeli violence, are expected to behave a certain way. You are supposed to be miserable—head bowed, wailing and weak and asking for mercy. You’re supposed to be polite in your suffering. And I completely refuse this. I refuse these politics of appeal. I don’t want to appeal to anyone. I can experience travesty and tragedy, and profound loss, and I can still make a joke about it. And that is the full spectrum of Palestinian humanity—or human humanity at large. We are human not just because we cry when we lose our mothers, or when we lose our homes, or because we have pets or hobbies. We are humans because we feel rage and we feel disdain—because we resist.

And I am honestly grateful for my disdain, because it reminds me that I am human. I am grateful for my rage, because it reminds me of my ability to react naturally to injustice. I am grateful for the opportunity to be flippant, to satirize and ridicule my impenetrable, indelible occupier. So, I invite you all to interrogate your biases as you leave this lecture, to interrogate what makes you want to qualify a Palestinian’s humanity. And I invite you, again, to be brave.

Mohammed El-Kurd, The Right to Speak for Ourselves. [emphasis added]

[sophiaphile]

The Curse finale interpretation

Ash's ascent/death, parallels to pregnancy, and "lived experience" in The Curse

There was a parallel between the way nobody believed or understood Asher when he was stuck in the tree to the way that pregnant people are treated while they are in labor (or even how women are treated in medical settings in general)

Ash's ascent/death

Nobody would believe Ash (besides Whitney who witnessed him floating inside the house and Moses who saw Ash float up into the tree) that he couldn't come down. Everyone who sees him projects their own interpretation of Ash's experience and intentions.

Dougie thinks Ash is running from his responsibilities because Dougie's dad did the same, and (from Dougie's POV), some men panic or even run away from their responsibilities once their partner is in labor or gives birth.

The neighbors from the community think that Ash and Dougie must be filming something because that's is their experience with these outsiders; they are TV people and act strangely, which can be explained by assuming that any weird behavior is a part of making a TV show. This explanation is also the best that they have for how Ash could possibly defy physical law (because it really isn't reasonable to assume that he just is breaking physical law in some way).

Ash repeatedly tells them that he will fly up. He tries his best to explain what he is going through, and he isn't doing the best job, probably because he's extremely afraid that he might die. I repeatedly tells Dougie and the first responders what he needs from them, and nobody listens. They think that Ash is delusional and that everyone else has a better understanding of the situation and therefore know what to do.

Connection to pregnancy

I think some of Ash's experience can be seen as analogous to what pregnant women (and women in medical settings in general) experience. Historically, doctors have been male, and they obviously have never been pregnant or gone into labor, and studies show that even women healthcare providers dismiss women and minorities in medical settings (it has to do with socialized biases in everyone, which I will come back to).

These professionals often dismiss a pregnant person's self-report of needing help, and a CDC report shows that 1 in 5 women report medical mistreatment while giving birth:

Approximately one in five (20.4%) respondents reported experiencing at least one type of mistreatment. The most commonly reported experiences of mistreatment were being ignored by health care providers, having requests for help refused, or not responded to (9.7%); being shouted at or scolded by health care providers (6.7%); having their physical privacy violated (5.1%); and being threatened with withholding of treatment or being forced to accept treatment they did not want (4.6%).

The same report found that the poorer the woman or more marginalized her background, the more risk of facing mistreatment:

Overall, 28.9% of respondents reported experiencing at least one form of discrimination during maternity care (Table 3), with highest prevalences reported by Black (40.1%), multiracial (39.4%), and Hispanic (36.6%) respondents. Overall, the most commonly reported reasons for discrimination were age (10.1%), weight (9.7%), and income (6.5%); reasons varied by race and ethnicity.

Initially Whitney planned to go to what was implied to be a better hospital. It feels like the show maybe wanted the viewer to expect that Whitney would die due to being at a "poor" hospital (and maybe she did; the finale went no full magical realism, imo). Benny and Nathan probably expected that viewers would immediately think or even assume that this would happen (drawing from our own biases, even if they are informed by statistics), which makes me think that Ash's experience is analogous to pregnant peoples' medical mistreatment.

In these medical settings, doctors frequently ignore a pregnant person's self-reports or requests for help, and instead, the doctors and medical staff (regardless of gender) tend to think that they know better or that the pregnant person is delusional/hormonal/emotional/etc. They dismiss their lived experience. Doctors have historically been male, so they have NO experience being pregnant, but they think they know better than the pregnant person, and even women who have been pregnant cannot speak for every woman. It is not rational to take your own experiences and extrapolate them to everyone else (which has been a common theme in the show: making assumptions based off of limited experience or socialized biases).

Like pregnant people facing medical mistreatment, Ash was ignored by health care providers Dougie and First Responders, had requests for help refused, or not responded to; he was shouted at or scolded by health care providers Dougie for running from responsibilities of becoming a father; and had treatment withheld (the anchored net that he repeatedly begged for) and was forced to accept treatment they did not want (tree branch cut off, sending him to his death).

Lived experience, hermeneutical gaps, and epistemic injustice

OKAY. So this comes back to (what I have taken to be) the overall recurrent theme of The Curse: lived experience, hermeneutical gaps/injustice, and testimonial injustice (which are forms of epistemic injustice, for anyone who is interested in learning more about this).

Hermeneutical gaps occur when a person or group lacks the concepts or terminology to describe their experience. Such gaps lead to hermeneutical injustice; Miranda Fricker describes hermeneutical injustice as occurring

when a gap in collective interpretive resources puts someone at an unfair disadvantage when it comes to making sense of their social experiences. An example of the first might be that the police do not believe you because you are black; an example of the second might be that you suffer sexual harassment in a culture that still lacks that critical concept . . . hermeneutical injustice is caused by structural prejudice in the economy of collective hermeneutical resources.

Before the term 'sexual harassment' came to be, people impacted by such harassment didn't have the concepts or terminology to be able to describe their experience or what they were going through; they were often dismissed as just being flirted with or they didn't even discuss their experience because even though the felt like something was wrong, they didn't have the concepts to articulate their experience, particularly to groups who do not have such experiences.

Here, Fricker describes hermeneutical injustice as:

. . . someone has a significant area of their social experience obscured from understanding owing to prejudicial flaws in shared resources for social interpretation . . . The wrong is analysed in terms of a situated hermeneutical inequality: the prejudicial flaws in shared interpretive resources prevent the subject from making sense of an experience which it is strongly in her interests to render intelligible.

So hermeneutical gaps (lack of conceptual resources [words or formed concepts] to describe experience) lead to hermeneutical injustice (where a person's experience is misinterpreted in a way that leads to harm or testimonial injustice).

Testimonial injustice occurs when one party (person or group) dismisses the credibility of another group (basically treating the marginalized person as though they are not a true knower).

An example might be Fernando trying to be heard about his knowledge of the community violence. Whitney dismisses him, thinking that she knows more about systemic issues. Ash takes advantage of this kind of injustice when he tries to cover his lie that Abshir, Nala, and Hani live in transitional housing once they bought the property they live in. Whitney called out the inconsistency, and Ash decided to exploit the lack of credibility marginalized people are usually extended. He says something like "honestly I don't know with them they say one thing then another," implying that they are dishonest.

Connecting Ash's ascent/death and medical mistreatment of pregnant people with overall themes in The Curse

ANYWAY. Pregnant people in labor go through a unique experience, and sometimes they lack the concepts necessary to explain their experience in a way that medical professionals will "understand" or take seriously (hermeneutical gap leading to hermeneutical injustice). Further, medical professionals dismiss a pregnant person's testimony and treat them like they are not credible while the medical professionals work from their own assumptions or formal medical knowledge (testimonial injustice).

Asher does not have the concepts to describe what he's going through. Nobody has experienced what he experienced, and the experience is new to him, so he doesn't know how to convey what he experiences in a way that Dougie and First Responders will understand. Further, Dougie and the First Responders dismiss Ash's testimony and treats him like he's not credible while Dougie and the First Responders work from their own assumptions or ascriptions of Ash's intentions.

Throughout the show, our main characters have made assumptions about poor people, natives, and their own employees. Many of these assumptions arise out of dismissing or discrediting the experiences of others in favor of their own interpretation of events or others' intentions. Whitney (and Ash) thinks she knows what's best for Las Espanola, even though she lacks the lived experience or even the proper educational experience to understand the complex nature of amending systemic injustice. She is like the medical professionals and First Responders who do not listen to the lived experiences (self-reports) of what people want or need.

This behavior necessarily implies that the people she's helping don't know what's best for themselves, which implies that Whitney has some kind of expertise that qualifies her to intervene on their behalf. She actually doesn't; she has no qualification other than she happens to have rich parents, which doesn't really qualify a person for any kind of job, especially one as complicated as amending economic or social injustice.

I didn't expect there to be growth on behalf of the characters (largely because people have pointed out that Safdie brother projects rarely involve any kind of meaningful growth or resolution; they have bleak outcomes), but in the finale, I thought that Whitney (and Ash) had grown. She expresses jealousy and bitterness that Cara was receiving national attention for leaving the art scene while her and Ash's show wasn't even aired; it ended up being direct to app content. She uncharitably criticizes Cara for disliking exploitive collectors, and Whit says that she thinks that Cara quit because no one bought her work. Ash jokes that maybe if Whit quits her project to work in a massage parlor, maybe people will write about her too. Whit bitterly jokes back that she would need some kind of cultural sob story like saying she was making a statement on the Holocaust. Ash says he knows that she's making joke that selling her art retraumatized her but goes on to point out that native people have gone through a lot, which he says that he fully understands where Cara is coming from and that people process tragedy in their own way (discussing Mel Brooks), and Whitney finally concedes that she probably shouldn't be talking the way she is and that she doesn't have that lived experience. He assures her that he considers her Jewish (and that she can make such jokes), but I think the takeaway is that—on some level—Whitney has gained some self-awareness and realizes that her experiences shouldn't inform the way she interprets other peoples' choices and intentions.

The concepts I discussed here might also be connected to the Dunning-Kruger Effect, which is the phenomenon that people (at any level of intelligence or education) learn something and think that they have a better understanding of what is going on than they actually do. When people (like Whitney) decide to act on such false assumptions of self-evaluation, they are likely to make mistakes or perpetuate injustice.

tldr; the real curse (imo) is the insidious implicit biases that are socialized into us and lead us to making assumptions about others' experiences and intentions. These assumptions ultimately create barriers that limit social understanding and social progress. If we all take a moment to examine why we reasoned as we do or where we get our ideas about people who don't share our ethnic, economic, gendered, religious, etc. background, we might find that we are missing the necessary lived experience (a hermeneutical gap) to understand where they might be coming from. Instead of assuming intent or competency or dismissing or being suspicious, we should all charitably interpret others to try to assume the best in and most of other people. It is what we would want others to do for us. Performing this kind of empathy will ultimately lead to developing the necessary empathy to overcome such biases by habit alone, which will create a more compassionate, empathetic, and understanding world, while also deepening and enriching our own lives and the lives of others by celebrating our plurality.

When we allow certain ideas into our head, they become very real to us, and when we act on those ideas without examining them carefully, those false beliefs can cause real harm.

[anonymouswarriorhumanist]

Hey beautiful people, this is going to be a long post yet a very important one. From a Desi (A South Asian) to my fellow Desis and non-Desis (who especially need to hear me out).

I know the popularity of Romance Club as an interactive game. And being a South Asian makes me wanna pick literally any story that represents us. So, I went into RC's stories promising South Asian representation: Kali: Call of Darkness and Kali: Flames of Samsara. Apart from the poor research done on Indian culture which is too niche and trivial to be understood by everyone (relating to Indian languages and North-South differences), there is yet another aspect of Indian society that the game not only completely misrepresents but even whitewashes and this is very harmful to people, especially those with no knowledge of Indian culture, picking up the game to learn smth and that is: CASTE.

While playing the game, I am sure many of u may have come across such terms as 'Brahmin' or 'Kshatriya', 'Vaishya', or even 'Shudra'. And I am sure many of u may even have a rudimentary understanding of the same. This is the caste/ varna (Sanskrit term) that has plagued Indian society for thousands of years. And these terms basically divide desis even today. I especially want non-South Asians to understand that these terms carry a history of violence and discrimation. This was the chaturvarna or the 4 varna/caste sys wherein groups were ranked on their superiority to each other.

Brahmin-Priestly class

Kshatriya-Soldiers/ warriors/kings

Vaishya-merchants and traders

Shudras-Servants/slaves, (the lowest rung on the caste ladder and the most miserable)

Do keep in mind that this is not some class sys similar to feudal Europe or France, but this is CASTE which is very diff from what a non-South Asian may imagine. Notions of purity and pollution guide the caste sys (which may not influence class). A Shudra person was considered impure and hence an 'untouchable' and their mere shadows were considered polluting on the other 3 castes, so much so that they were ghettoized. In South Asia, servile work is generally considered 'polluting' and a complex history of multiple factors relegated this strict division of labourers, In simple lang, a Brahmin priest's son could only be a priest (which was a divine occupation and revered) and a Shudra's son could only do work considered appropriate of his caste which usually translated to things such as manual scavenging (still in India) and servile work considered 'polluting' from which they had no respite. This system was horrible towards Shudras in general as their labour was appropriated by the upper castes for their own gain very similar to how African slave labourers worked at white plantations if I hv to draw a rough comparison. Shudras/Dalits (the term 'Dalit' means broken/oppressed and was given by a Dalit leader and Indian legend Dr. Ambedkar to help uplift this community in Indian society) are subject to not only physical but structural violence. They were barred entry in schools, wells, tanks, roads and literally everywhere since their presence of 'polluting'. Now I have 2 more points:

In RC, I know everyone loves the male leads, and rightly so. But u need to understand that Ratan Vaish and Amrit Doobay won't give a fuck if a Dalit person died in front of them no matter how caring they might be. Since Brahmins were the priestly class, they hegemonized control over Hindu deities and mythology and only they could 'talk' to Gods (according to them ofc and their superiority complex). Amala is a Basu (a Bengali Brahmin surname) and hence both Doobay (again Brahmin) and Vaish (def upper-caste surname) r after her. If Amala was a Dalit, Amrit would hv raped and even killed her (Dalit women and the sexual violence enacted upon them by upper-caste men....again to draw a comparison similar to black women being raped by white men during slavery and jim crow eras: Google Hathras Rape case) and Ratan would have ignored her. We all need to understand that a similar fate would hv befallen Deviya Sharma (again a Brahmin woman) as even she would have been raped and ignored by other Brahmins and upper caste men in the story such as Ram/or Kamal etc. Arhat is likely a Shudra and Deviya will never bat an eyelash at him since his only job is to be in service to her tiger which Deviya probably treats with more respect than she does Arhat. My point is RC is mass producing these stories for the hyper-privileged White people of India i.e. the upper castes and that is Brahmins and Kshatriyas and Vaishyas. Dalits have rarely been entertained in representation much less in India than in abroad. But that is not what I am pissed abt. What I am pissed abt is that an American sitting in their home will check this story and see terms such as Brahmin or Kshatriya thrown abt without understanding them and then even internalize the harmful notions about these terms and caste in general in both stories abt a bunch of upper-castes freaking out over some goddess ritual.

Be very careful people in what u accept and what u don't bcoz even if it is a game, many non-Desi people may not have the relevant positionality (and that is completely fine!) to understand how the insidious caste sys is being shown and represented by RC. It is being glorified even (ik in the earlier chapters of KCD where Brahmins r shown as saviors of society and keeping Indian society stable when in reality they have done nothing but dehumanize and alienate Dalits for generations) and downplayed and even whitewashed as some trivial division. If RC wanted to publish a story about upper-caste people then pls go ahead but don't you dare whitewash it and glorify the caste sys. When impressionable audiences see all this, it is in their best interest to know the ugly truth about Indian society and not some cheap exotisation of the same. BE BETTER, especially for the Dalits who have suffered so much in South Asia. I am also attaching some material as I would greatly appreciate it if more people knew about the horrors of the caste system and how it plagues Desi society even today.

Discrimination (all types) r shitty and needs to kicked in the balls. Many times, it is subtle and while we may not know much, it is our responsibility to know more and try our best to stop it in whatever way we can.

Thank you for staying and take care y'all.

http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/Ambedkar1916.pdf

https://www.marxists.org/archive/ambedkar/2015.143076.Who-Were-The-Shudras.pdf

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-54418513

https://www.thenewsminute.com/kerala/being-dalit-india-being-buffalo-says-kancha-ilaiah-76233

[recklessfuture001]

Why is there so much pain in this world? It is strange when you get to thinking about it.

It seems that we shouldn't have to hurt so much. So many things could be better, and when I have expressed this in the past, there are people who seem to get offended by it. That changing anything about the horror of all this is taboo somehow.

Or that changing anything is just an idealistic dream. Sure, there will always be pain in the world, I think. There will always be hurt and abusive people that know how to operate between the cracks. However, there is so much that seems could be done to make things better. Bad things are just allowed to proliferate within this system. So much of this current mode of production feeds off of human suffering that it boggles the mind that you could call this anywhere close to a democracy. Policies that are vastly unpopular with the majority of people are made into law without much of a fight from anyone that we are told are our representatives.

All the things that were considered public goods in the past not all that long ago are cast aside as more and more are privatized. The poor and the working class have to put up with more and more being taken away and a lower quality of life. When does it stop? When do the people gather their strength as one to not just make the demand, but to assert that certain things just should not be tolerated? Things such as child labor, genocide, exploitation of natural resources for private gain, colonial wars of domination, etc. We don't support these things that our governments do, but they keep on happening anyway.

It helps to not give in to too much pessimism. There have been gains in the past that led to positive outcomes. How do we make things happen that reflect the will and desires of the majority of people. It appears to me that what appears to us through the mediums advancing today are both a blessing and a curse. I worry that it is slowly becoming more and more negative though. How do you approach epistemological certainty in a world where technology is geared more and more towards surveillance, deception, coercion, etc.?

[indizombie]

Savarnas often ask ‘would you go for treatment from a doctor who got medical seat using reservation?’ The whole narrative rests on testimonial injustice where the expertise of a DBA individual is discarded, despite having the degree and experience. Interestingly this argument will never be used for doctors who used EWS reservation or even paid management seats. The use of ‘Merit’ against reservation to undermine the intellect and capabilities of DBA community is the most popular example of epistemic injustice done on the community.

Pranav Jeevan, ‘Epistemic Injustice: Does Knowledge have Caste?’, Round Table India

[bfpnola]

IMAGE DESCRIPTION UNDER THE CUT.

A new task force! Admittedly when we first discussed this, we were a bit upset, knowing how passionate we were to start up a new media literacy workshop for the summer. But upon further thought, honest conversations like these need to happen in every organization, ones where we admit our current capabilities and limitations so as to best protect everyone's time and energy while simultaneously continuing to fulfill our mission statement.

Further, we've already noticed a weight lifted amongst our volunteers! We utilized yesterday's Sunday meeting time to discuss BFP's history thus far, what it means to be a 501(c)(3), the nonprofit industrial complex, why we utilize a horizontal organizational structure, and then the best part? Our core beliefs! We only got to the first three (the right to organize, intersectionality, and educational equity), but the conversation was SO productive! Youth were given the chance to openly ask and answer questions with fellow activists around the globe. Even with just those three topics, we were able to cover: organizing tips, COINTELPRO, the gamification of politics, elite capture, epistemic injustice, the infantilisation faced by those at the intersection of transness and disability, equity vs equality, and accommodations in school! So much!

Next Sunday we'll continue this educational dialogue, so feel free to join us on Zoom (link available through our Discord server as well as college and career mentorship, peer support, mutual aid, private channels for marginalized communities, and the space to openly ask any social justice related questions without shame)! And once we eventually cover all of our core beliefs, BFP will officially begin designing a specific mission and timeline for this new task force, ensuring that all of us fully understand what our nonprofit stands for before making concrete decisions. Genuinely so excited to see how our little family transforms as we have already learned so much from one another in just one meeting since making this decision :)

[P.S. We do have bots in our server that can translate text messages for our non-English speakers, bots for those with dissociative identity disorder so their alters/fronts appear as different accounts with different names, bots for our nightly studying and music sessions, nonverbal emotes, and more!]

[ID: All 10 slides are a very pale mint green with a white circle made of diagonal stripes inside of a white tilted square made of thick dashes as the background. In the foreground is a white rectangle with curved edges meant to mimic an iPhone's "Notes" app with the bold, italics, underline, strikethrough, numbered list, and bullet point icons pictured at the bottom of the rectangle. Which icon is being highlighted shifts with each slide depending on the formatting of the text. At the top left corner, it reads "Notes" with a small arrow pointing left. And at the top right corner, "@bfpnola."

The slides read as follows:

"Honoring our dedication to transparency, this is BFP's current state of affairs:

Developing proper onboarding

Activity & Retention Task Force

Nonprofit Industrial Complex"

BFP was originally founded in 2016 by a team of 12 year olds in New Orleans, Louisiana. As the organization grew internationally and the work became more complex, we began to lose volunteers almost immediately as they joined. Why? We didn't have a proper onboarding process, aka a clear and efficient orientation and trainings for newcomers! As kids ourselves, none of us had entered the workforce yet so we weren't even aware that "onboarding" existed. Because of this, new hires would either become overwhelmingly confused and leave or be thrown straight into the work and burn out. As young adults now, we aim to create an efficient onboarding process and share our discoveries with other youth organizations in the future!

Due to that confusion, BFP has become incapable of hosting any more large-scale workshops, as we have failed to thoroughly prepare our newer volunteers with clarity. We owe it to those directly impacted by coercive hierarchies to do better. So, what's next for us? On 03/26, we decided to create a cross-committee Activity & Retention Task Force. This team will be dedicated to expanding our audience, maintaining the family that we've curated thus far, analyzing the success and failures of our work, and most importantly... Emphasizing BFP as a safe space for marginalized youth globally. With such a diverse team, we are always learning from one another and we'd like to continue sharing that opportunity with as many people as possible. But there's something we'd like to keep in mind!

The Nonprofit Industrial Complex. We are aware as a 501(c)(3) that organizations' radical missions can often become co-opted either by their donors or distracted by their own maintenance. If BFP ever becomes too focused on its own survival rather than that of the oppressed… We will take that needed step back. Community should always be our focus. This task force is meant to broaden youth’s access to political education and peer support, not necessarily propel BFP within the nonprofit industry. The people must come first and foremost.

More concrete steps will be released soon to hold ourselves accountable. We look forward to improving this organization so that BFP can put out the work that y'all deserve and that we know we are capable of producing. Thank you for reading! Check the caption for more information."

End ID.]

[stimpunks]

The Lack of Listening in Healthcare

Our allies at Human Restoration Project shared the efforts of their friends at Cortico on “human listening” and “community listening”. I’m here for human listening and community listening and participatory research. As I dive back into the medical model for another round of treatment, I again profoundly feel the lack of listening and the weight of invalidation and epistemic injustice as I…

[profestriga]

I meant to post this some months ago when I defended, but accidentally saved as a draft. Despite the absurd formatting requirements, I discovered we're allowed to have a frontispiece.

[rudetuesday]

I have a couple of folders full of screenshots with no useful titles. I know this is from a video I saw on YouTube, so now I need to look at my viewing/browsing history. Digital clutter is a a problem.

[taliabhattwrites]

The most widespread form of transmisogyny within the queer community is denying trans women epistemic authority.

Which means: people do not believe us on our own experiences. They frequently assume any and all oppression we face must be mild or must simply be anti-effeminacy instead of "real misogyny". We are considered to be exaggerating the material consequences of bigotry on us and assumed to not experience various harms that we in fact do, including medical misogyny, sexual violence, CSA, being infantilized and dismissed, being inadequately represented (since most popular depictions of us are cissexist caricatures and do not authentically portray our lived realities!), and more besides.

Perhaps the most hysteria inducing aspect of this is being told that our testimony is not frequently dismissed, BY PEOPLE WHO ARE ACTIVELY DISMISSING OUR TESTIMONY ON HOW MUCH MISOGYNY AND DEGENDERING AND VIOLENCE WE EXPERIENCE.

We are not "new to oppression". We do not have to be taught what it is like to be feminized and dehumanized under patriarchy. We are painfully familiar with how misogyny operates and experience it regularly, in addition to having to justify even to "our" communities that we do in fact experience it!

That, my friends, is the core of transmisogyny: being dehumanized while being denied the right to even name one's oppression or have it be acknowledged as such!

[hussyknee]

I'm always so fascinated by how small Palestine is. There's only 4.9 million of them in the country. The global diaspora compromise about 6 million though. It's insane that more than half its population is displaced and barred from coming home.

Israel has a population of 9.3 million, grown over 75 years of genocide, luring in settlers, and sucking on the imperial teat. They're still always so hilariously mad at Palestinians for having large families. "How can we be doing a genocide when they keep having. So. Many. Fucking. Brats??" Ostensibly because of the notion that it's the Israeli taxpayer that's supposed to support this ungrateful welfare state. Rhetoric straight out of an anti-Black fuck-them-poors Reagan dream.

Fecundity may be a deliberate way of resisting the entity hell-bent on wiping out their people. But it's also the result of factors that limit women's autonomy and sexual freedom, like poverty, reduced education infrastructure, high unemployment, religious fundamentalism, and urban and military violence. (Palestine used to be one of the most secular in the region and moved further towards religious conservativism with the escalation of Israeli terrorism.) Idk why fascists deliberately create these conditions then get mad when birth rates sky rocket.

Palestine's education system has done quite admirably though, considering it's had to struggle through Israel's chokehold. It's literacy rate is a very respectable 96.9%, tertiary education enrollment 45% and its rate of tertiary education for women one of the highest in the MENA region. The problem is women being barred from actually putting all that education to use, I'm guessing because of an economy perpetually in crisis, restricted freedom of movement, conservative gender bias and being expected to manage large families.

I can't even fathom how much more difficult things will be for Palestinians when Israel's finished with Gaza. All eleven universities have been bombed, all but a handful of hospitals still standing, along with libraries, schools, community centers, mosques, churches and targeted strikes systematically taking out the most distinguished academics, researchers, doctors, scientists, writers and artists— all its mentors and luminaries. Displacement is almost secondary to ensuring a complete cultural and epistemic genocide, that destroys not just immediate living conditions like water, food, fuel, power, shelter and medical treatment, but also all hope of emancipating and uplifting themselves through education and a knowledge economy.

[librarycards]

“Marginalized” is not a characteristic inherent + ontologically glued to a particular type of “voice” or person. Voices are marginalized, verb, by systems of structural violence and exclusion. The solution to this is not to carry certain voices into the center, but to decimate systems of epistemic violence at a structural, architectural level.

[sophiaphile]

Dream Scenario accurately depicts how some people don't have empathy or compassion for other people until they have something similar happen to them. It also captured how frustrating it is to be boxed in and marginalized for things that are outside of a person's control.

Paul (Nic Cage) is a straight, white tenured professor teaching university courses on evolutionary biology.

He repeatedly invokes Rationality™ (as if rational thought can be fully divorced from emotion or normativity). At one point, he cuts Tim Meadows's character off and scoffs at him when he thinks Meadows is considering the "lived experience" of the students who are having heinous nightmares about Paul.

Early in the movie, his wife says she's not having these dreams, but she says that if she did, she'd want him in David Byrne's big suit coming onto her (or something like that I think). He laughs at her fantasy, not listening to what a real life woman is telling him she wants because it is inconsistent with the cultural messages he receives. After he criticizes her, she frustratingly says something like "fine you have a big cock, is that what you wanted to hear?"

He is an evolutionary biologist who thinks that he is smarter and more logical than everyone else. In a lecture, he discusses how zebra's stripes don't blend in with things in their natural habitat; it is a little baffling at first glance why they developed them, but when zebra are in a group their stripes protect them from easily being targeted by predators.

Human psychology (which Paul seems to reject as a field of study) might seem counterintuitive to nature. Given that we are rational beings, why would we judge things based on appearance when we know that there is evidence otherwise (these are just dreams or socialized biases about class, race, gender, etc.; we think we should know better)? Unfortunately, our own psychology is not always clear to us, and there are things going on below the surface of our stated beliefs and intentions, even if we haven't done the work to reflect on it.

On the other hand, developing a defense against traumatic events (real or imagined) can be a healthy defense mechanism, but such thinking is also harmful to those who get thrown under the bus for the group to feel safe (the singled out zebra and society's scapegoats). The dynamic is not fair, but it does make sense despite seeming irrational or arational.

He wants his academic work to be acknowledged, but he is famous for appearing in peoples' dreams. He is frustrated that he can't control his image or the narrative around it.

He hates that people make assumptions about him based off of their dreams, which he has no control over. He doesn't want to be boxed in. He starts to lose his status due to the box he's being put in.

He loses his job, and his wife also loses work opportunities because she's married to him. He continues to spiral and not consider his wife or kids' pov when they ask him to stop feeding into the media hype. He makes decisions that actively ignore his family's reported feelings and experiences because he feels he knows best. His wife leaves him.

Eventually, he is such a social pariah that only Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan, France, Tucker Carlson, etc. will have him, but he doesn't want to be associated with right-wing hate.

Because he is boxed in such a stifling way, he can choose only between railing against his box, which gets him nowhere and leaves him with no financial prospects, or conforming and being allowed to participate in society in some compacity (much like people who are marginalized due to their perceived social identity).

Paul didn't care about other peoples' experiences (his wife and kids' reported lived experience of being uncomfortable and wanting him to stop what he was doing) because the system was serving him well enough that he didn't feel the need to question it, which is also why during his downfall, he threw in the school admin's face that he has a PhD and she just has a BA (even though she had her master's); he wanted to reinforce the hierarchy that had served him until it singled him out (via society forming bias against him based off things outside his control, like most marginalized people).

It is ironic because Paul keeps talking about the zebras, but he can't apply the same logic to human beings and that was his hubris. He thinks psychology is bullshit, but it does make sense from an evolutionary standpoint, just like the zebra's stripes do.

He took his privilege for granted and didn't realize he won the social lottery by being white, straight, and upper middle class. He scoffed at the idea of "lived experience" and griped that people need to grow up and that they are too sensitive.

Ironically, the discrimination he faced was his lived experience and other people didn't care because they couldn't help the way their brains formed negative associations with him/his image.

He wanted people to acknowledge his lived experience and check their biases towards him that were informed by their nightmares, but he ignored his wife and kids' lived experience, and he was unwilling to consider whether he was biased in his thinking that he knows best or that they were being too sensitive.

The final scene was crushing. He goes to his wife in a dream to give her the fantasy she described earlier in the movie: him in the DB over-sized Stop Making Sense suit. I wonder whether the suit was maybe meant to symbolize that Paul needed to let go of thinking he was right about everything and that all life adheres to Rationality™ (and instead adheres to a kind of logic he previously rejected). He needed to stop trying to make sense and be more open minded to others' views.

[terralexical]

crazy how the brain lets itself die under epistemology like mf you are the know

but then . how do you verify . how did i know to ask that

[indizombie]

When knowledge becomes an exclusive product under savarna domination, it creates an unjust system of power hierarchy where knowledge produced and communicated by DBA communities are either discarded or delegitimized without a second thought. The injustice done to a person in their capacity as a knower (producer and communicator of knowledge) is called Epistemic Injustice. This is a concept in social epistemology that refers to the unfair distribution of knowledge, credibility, or intellectual resources when someone is denied access to knowledge or is not believed, despite having relevant knowledge or expertise, because of their social identity, such as their race, caste, gender, class, or disability. The term was coined by a British philosopher, Miranda Fricker.

Pranav Jeevan, ‘Epistemic Injustice: Does Knowledge have Caste?’, Round Table India