#human rights violations on. there’s no group of people it’s okay to dehumanise.

[proudfreakmetarusonikku]

it’s so fucked to me that people will use fucking war crimes as an excuse to spread bigotry like. imagine seeing the suffering of innocents and using that to spread bigoted propaganda. it has nothing to do with a whole group of people being inherently evil or vile solely down to religious and cultural differences- that dehumanisation is what leads to the war crimes against innocent civilians. antisemitism is vile and it’s horrific to me that bigots will use outrage and horror at a very real humanitarian crisis and demonise a whole group of people when not only is that obviously evil but it’s also just breeding the same sort of dehumanising sentiment that allows the war crimes in palestine to continue.

[valtsv]

okay but the entire concept of saints in the silt verses is so immensely fucked up. like. it sets up this entire class/caste system of people whose purpose is to grease the wheels that keep the rest of society running by being tortured until their bodies are twisted and reshaped into tools of forced labour. and this conscription explicitly targets some of the most marginalised and vulnerable groups as a punishment for their perceived failure to perform an adequate or useful role in society. there doesn't even appear to be a limit - as long as the gods are fed, saints can be mass-produced and reproduced to meet whatever quota is drawn up. their dehumanisation is absolute; VAL is almost certainly not the only saint to ever retain her sapience, she's just the first where it was considered an asset - how many saints were purged shortly after their birth because they were too aware of the horror of their own existence? even progressives like shrue refer to them as "it"s, emphasising the pronoun to give weight to the point that saints are generally considered to be too divorced from their own humanity to be worth advocating for. they're just an unfortunate part of life! we have to keep our infrastructure running somehow! and when we hear from some of the legislatures who do use their (presumably) preferred pronouns as identity markers, like carson with VAL and the timothy the inspiration saint, well, that's somehow even worse, because it shows that they either see them as fundamentally disposable people who deserve what happens to them (as implied by the joke about having shrue hallowed for being too outspoken about their reservations), and/or they know that they're committing human rights violations, and they know they can get away with it.

[valkyrieandstrangeridingaragorn]

I was scrolling through the anti-Sokovian accords tag and I was thinking.

Imagine if Erik Lehnsherr were in CA: CW. He wouldn't need to use his powers; all he would need to do is pull his sleeve up and show the numbers that stripped him of his identity when he was a young boy.

He would look Tony and Ross dead in the eyes and say. "I dare you to tell me that silly document of yours isn't similar to the ones that stripped my people of their dignity and lives. I dare you to tell me what happened to me isn't going to happen to my Wanda."

Or Matt Murdock and Foggy Nelson who would read the absolute filth out of Tony and Ross and pull out a printed version of the accords, scribbled with a red pen that points out every human rights violation.

Or Bruce Banner who would say to Tony "Did you forget what he (Ross) did to me?"

I'm 100% with you but I fear if the Russos were in charge of Erik, they would find a way to blame him and pin it all on him.

They were so focused on trying to convince the audience that the Accords were a good thing that they showed the exact opposite. It's kind of a weird "show, don't tell" that shows one thing while the movie is telling you another.

And the worst part of it is that IW proves they meant nothing when it comes to the Avengers... but what about everyone else? Like when Steve and Nat break their pals out of the Raft. What about all the other inmates (or should I call them hostages? "Imprisonment without a trial", as per the Accords literal words)? Like when we're told about Zemo being held there... The guy is a nazi but was he tortured too? Like Sam was? Like Wanda? When not a single movie or series ever mentions that, not even in passing?

That's the whole issue with fascism. They dehumanise a group of people and tell you it's okay, hell we're seeing it nowadays. So in a good movie, Erik would bring that up, Wanda would talk about Sokovia, Sam could bring up racism, Steve about immigration... But that's not what CW wanted to do.

CW stayed in the same lane as all the other movies that defend Stark, blame Fury in the same breath they sanctify Peggy Carter and justify and sympathize with Thanos while laughing and literally slapping Thor in the face. Not even TWS is free of this.

I suppose some of us made the mistake of thinking a superhero franchise would be on the heroes side. But the MCU proved time and time again that they're not.

[submalevolentgrace]

Hey, just fyi ESRB & PEGI don't screen specifically for medical abuse so media isn't required give warnings for it, you could try to petition ESRB/PEGI to add that to their rating system, but currently you won't get any warnings for that content from official sites. It may sometimes fall under violence/fantasy violence/gore so if a piece of media has any of those warnings it might mean theres medical abuse

For now I really recommend doesthedogdie.com to get specific trigger warnings for media, usually you have to wait a week or two after something comes out for the warnings (its based on votes by users), but they include warnings for ableism, amputation, & body horror, along with like 100 other things

Sorry people are being shitty to you, hope you're doing okay <3

honestly fascinated by why you decided to send me this

i never even mentioned ratings boards because i know they're useless when it comes to actually codifying or describing what's in media that might be upsetting. there were a bunch of people in the notes arguing about ratings boards though, maybe that's what made you think to say this to me, except i am not those people

i also don't trust any aggregate site like doesthedogdie or unconsentingmedia, because honestly, ableism is baked so deep into every aspect of culture that the only people who know how to recognise what might be triggering for medical abuse are people that have experienced it or inflicted it... everyone else is, at best, obliviously desensitised to it

i can't pull up the original text of my post now since i've deleted all my branches of it to stop the notes, but i'm certain that i framed it as making a trigger warning known for other disabled people that have experienced forced treatment or surgery, and any reference to it happening 'without warning' is in the sense that, it's extreme body horror in a context that doesn't prepare the audience for it; ie, going into a horror game franchise like resident evil, dead space, soulsbornesekiroring etc, the audience can be reasonably assumed to be prepared for horror elements including fucked up body shit... i don't think any reasonable person could be expected to start up the latest installment of 'the legend of brightly coloured elf boy saves the magical princess from a big demon pig with a laser shooting sword' and be met with mummified cross species unconsenting arm transplant - and i say that as someone that was bracing for the worst possible outcome since the first trailers, based on my own arm issues. it never once occurred to me that they would go that batshit insanely horrifying with it, because it's a zelda game.

and also like - i really don't actually want to pile on you personally kind stranger, i can see that you're making a gesture you believe is helpful from a place of compassion and that's a positive even if it lands poorly - but i'm absolutely fascinated by the schema, the mental and perceptual framework, that has to be in place to see this kind thing, to see someone implying their direct experience with the hospital system willfully inflicting graphic body horror on them in violation of their autonomy, and to think in response: "well, you could petition industry groups to put more specific warning labels on games"

like, doctors are out there right now doing horrific surgical abuse on disabled people because society at large doesn't view us as human, abled people are in denial that it's happening or supporting the "mercy" and "compassion" of the doctors that do it, and that dehumanisation and denial runs so deep that it casually makes its way into family entertainment without a second thought of the authors.... the problem isn't "ratings boards aren't specific enough" and i cannot fathom the chain of thoughts that led you to that idea

so, incase it isn't obvious, no i am not doing okay, and i never will be again because of what was done to me..... but... i do appreciate that you hope i am doing okay all the same

[kalessinsdaughter]

There's a reason why we made human rights universal and unconditional. It's because if violating another person is only wrong when you sympathise with the victim, then everyone is free to violate whomever they choose.

@littleashmedai said it well (in a different context):

It's hard, when your value system tells you that everyone is a human being, everyone deserves human rights, that there are things that it's not okay to say or do or think about anyone. That requires work, endless, difficult work, to not just believe but actually act as if there is truly no acceptable target for pure, unleavened, gleeful no-holds-barred hate and violence and bigotry. People want - humans want, all of us, this is a profoundly normal human desire - a guilt-free, nuance-free enemy. It's part of why zombie movies are so popular. Zombies aren't human, they can't suffer, they don't have feelings or histories or trauma or complicated backstories or any motivation other than mindless destruction. It's morally acceptable to hold nothing back and glory in violence against them. It feels good! Humans want that. And being the kind of person most leftists want to believe they are means accepting that you can't ever have it.

I worry, sometimes, that the left is forgetting why we don't dehumanise people, no matter what; why even the people we might feel justified to hate—because they have committed horrible atrocities, or hurt us personally—are still human beings.

Because right now, it feels as if even the left is beginning to treat human rights as a privilege reserved for the deserving, and revelling in identifying groups they can label as undeserving. And that scares me.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was written in blood. I shudder to think what happens if we roll it back.

i am too autistic to understand the intuitive drive that ppl have to make others pay for their wrongdoings with suffering. why does the pedophile need to be raped in prison, i dont get it. no correlation

[musingsofmaniacs]

The Battle for Our Souls

The biggest casualty of strongmen getting elected that not a lot of people talk or think about, because as Trevor Noah puts ‘Ain’t Nobody Has Time for That’, is the social and personal psyche. There are always two ways to win over, rule or lead people. One is to unite them. To appeal to the similarity, to remind them that there are far more things that unite us than divide us. This is difficult, because humans are evolutionarily primed to focus on the contrasts. Woody Allen once said that if only two people remain on earth after rest of humanity has destroyed itself, the left-handed guy will take on the right handed one. Uniting people is slow painful task where success comes in excruciating increments, where for every one step forward, one risks sliding two back.

Or you could just divide people into tribes that hate each other's guts and make sure your tribe votes harder than theirs. This divide-and-rule strategy is as old as humanity itself, though the motto (divide et impera) is attributed to Philip II of Macedonia. Machiavelli called it an effective strategy to weaken enemies.  British used it in India and advanced into the subcontinent at an astounding pace. And Donald Trump used it to propel himself from a joke candidate to a joke President, only it’s not so funny this time.

Trump has succeeded so well in doing this, that his statement about shooting someone at 5th Avenue in New York and getting away with it seems horrifyingly accurate. In Trump’s tribe, The Man can do no wrong, and any evidence against him make people question the facts themselves. As Trump progresses in office, he keeps alienating his opponents more and more, while his base gets consolidated and strengthened by the day. At this rate 2020 will be less of a battle of ideals and issues and more of a ‘Might-is-Right’ contest between two group.

There was an article in The Economist on how moderates have become an extinct species. Moderate voices will always become a casualty when the discourse takes sharp turn towards ideological extremes. The Republican Party has effectively cannibalised voices with veneer of sanity, and replaced them with gun-toting-Bible-thumping-sons-of-soil; where they would rather vote in a peadophile with tribe loyalty than a moderate critical thinking maverick.

Technology was once a great uniter. It helped the cause of democracy with Arab Spring, India’s Anti-Corruption movement, Net Neutrality and so much more. We elevated the Techpreneurs to messianic figures proclaiming the gospel of hyper-connectedness and outreach. Today, we have to an extent confronted the damage these glorified advertising corporations and their tools can inflict on the state of the nation. The Cambridge Analytica scandal has cast Mark as the villian. The fact remains though that it is foolish of us to feign shock over what we always suspected, and in fact knew, these Ad-holes were up to, and that we would gladly give up privacy for the convenience of sharing a selfie of us with our breakfasts.

The mechanism employed to delegitimise the opponent is straight out of Joseph Goebbels playbook. By constantly referring to your opponents with an unkind adjective, like ‘Crooked Hillary’, ‘Low-Energy Jeb’, ‘Lying Ted’, he is making sure these people are dehumanised and reviled by his support base. Constantly badgering people with lies like election fraud, wiretapping, ‘witch hunt’ and crowd size makes the fan base buy into the idea of widespread conspiracy. Hell, Trump has even thrown FBI into jeopardy to increase his support among his base.

The ruling party in India has adopted a similar strategy to delegitimise opposition, with its highly effective social media machinery belting out catchphrases and blurbs like ‘Pappu’ and aggressively sharing memes about how great their Exalted Highness is. The discourse has descended into primitive tribalism so badly, that the supporters are finding it difficult to see any wrong in the rape of an eight year old girl. Systematic, some subtle and some not so subtle, efforts to equate loyalty and blind Nationalism to patriotism is underway. Party spokespersons ask us to be grateful that people are not jailed for speaking out against the government. Leaders bayed for arrest of the family after a man was lynched for alleged possession of beef, conveniently ignoring the brutal mob justice part or even describing the mob as innocent! That the most populous state in the country is now ruled by a fanatic whose government does not regard Taj Mahal as a monument worthy of endorsement. School textbooks are being tweaked to suit the ideology of the ruling party, extolling the virtues of debatable schemes rolled out by the government and disregarding achievements of previous governments.

That’s all OK, but what’s it got to do with you and me?

Image Courtesy: FunEcho, YouTube

Valid question. That takes us to where we started. Let’s begin with Trump. Everytime the POTUS tweets, that becomes the news. Trump is keenly aware of this. And he was a reality TV star. So he keeps peppering them with generous doses of outrageous statements. Martin Scorsese used a similar trick to get Taxi Driver approved with R rating with its bloody scenes. MPAA wanted to give the film an X, but by submitting the film uncut again and again, he desensitised the censors and got them to give an R. We now accept that the leader of the free world will bully anybody who opposes him using unkind words absolutely unbecoming of a man of his stature. We accept that a president can just support Nazis and not expect impeachment at all. As the administration turns the government into a cemetery, the public is letting smaller skeletons slide. In India, the fringe has come out of hiding. We are finding it okay, and even legitimate that there be a sound logic to murder of a senior journalist for her strong views against The Party. Demonising minority community and dissing them openly is becoming more and more mainstream. Leaders who have called for violence against the minorities, who have engineered riots, who have made fake exodus claims, are now finding themselves elected and popular, because they work ‘18 hours’ a day and ‘transfer non-performing bureaucrats’. That when a violent opposition towards a mediocre period drama resulted in a school bus with kids getting stones pelted, the social media devotees defended by commenting at least nobody was injured.  That when pointed about States violating freedom of speech, one gets responses such as ‘Do you have guts to make a movie on the other religion’.

There is a decline in the political and moral discourse. The emphasis is less on merits and demerits of ideas and more on the person or the party behind it. When this happens, debates gets infused with sentimentality. When you have an opposing political stand to a coworker or a friend or family, things get taken personally and suddenly, you are an enemy. You are to them, trying to undermine the effort of a man working 20 hour days trying to save the country from decay that everybody else had wrought upon for 60 years. Imagine the arrogance we allow when we idolise people that were once considered fringe and vilify everybody else who have had an important role to play in the country’s history. Nehru may have made mistakes, but he did what he thought was best for the country. So did Gandhi..

When we mainstreamise the fringe, where do we go from there? When we shut our eyes to rationality and reason and have unquestioning and blind faith in a party or a man, it undoes the centuries worth of works of soldiers and writers and philosophers and saints and statesmen who fought for ideals that ask us to rise above the petty tribalism. The very idea that the ideals, the morals, the rights, the institutions are greater than a person, a party, a caste, a religion or a group might be at stake here. The great war today is not between right and left, between Trump and Dems, between One Man and the 19 odd parties; it is between the works of centuries that has woven a fragile fabric of our socio-economico-politico-moral existence with enough checks and balances and our primitive instincts that threaten to tear it all apart, testing these checks to the limit.

In other words, it's a battle for our collective souls.

References:

1. Taxi Driver: https://books.google.com/books?id=40UTI-uUHpwC&pg=PA108&dq=%22We+got+congratulated+on+changes+that+we+never+made%22&hl=en&sa=X&ei=iU1mUqH7HYeTrgf6kYCQDA&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=%22We%20got%20congratulated%20on%20changes%20that%20we%20never%20made%22&f=false

2. The Economist Article: https://www.economist.com/united-states/2016/01/14/the-centre-cannot-hold?fsrc=scn/fb/te/pe/ed/thecentrecannothold

3. The war on textbooks: https://washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2018/06/01/indias-new-textbooks-are-promoting-the-prime-ministers-favorite-policies-critics-allege/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.0cfb5af3c8e4

4. Beef over beef: https://firstpost.com/india/dadri-lynching-take-action-against-akhlaqs-kin-for-eating-beef-says-adityanath-2811776.html

[highlights-of-the-lowlife]

An open letter

I recently had an...interaction with @lindsayetumbls which was fun. I sent them an ask hoping they would stop using the word lame because it targets disabled people like me.

My ask was (And I have sources for this in case anyone asks)

“I’ve been a fan of your work for years but going through your older work, you’ve used both the R slur and autistic as an insult. In recent videos you’ve the word lame. Could you please find other insults that don’t have a history of dehumanising or actively othering and attacking people like me for having physical and neurological disabilities?”

This was their response. Or at least part of it and more on that in a minute.

“*deep sigh, centers self*

Okay, I actually made a blog post about this YEARS ago. Since its an old blog post, I can understand that you might not have thought to hunt that down. I do think it’s pretty weaksauce to be like “could you please stop??” on eight and nine year old videos when its pretty obvious I have stopped. I shouldn’t have said those things, I was young, it was a different time, mea culpa.

But I do think there is a line to be drawn, and “Lame” is it. Same with words like “imbecile,” “idiot,” “moron” and so on. Yes, there is an underlying history of ableism for some of them. I understand and empathize with why you shouldn’t use as an insult “retarded” and “austistic.” But lame seems to me a bridge too far.

YOU. DO. NOT. GET. TO. DECIDE. WHAT. IS. ABLEIST.

But furthermore this was brought this up in a livestream and laughed about. Literally handwaved away.

http://listenonrepeat.com/watch/?v=G0Qz-ZCwbaQ#Inter__Persona_and_You

(For anyone wondering why its on listenonrepeat.com its because the video has been age gated and this is a workaround. The context starts at 54:00 because it relates to others being called out on trans slurs when they themselves might be NB or trans in some regard. The group brushes it off and says this person might be kinda right but you’re annoying so we will disregard you)

I am far too steamed to write a complete verbatim script for this so feel free if anyone wants to add. The entire defense of the use of slurs in this regard is that the person using them might be part of the group they target. You are not. You are able bodied. I get that my wording could have been vague on the issue of their work from years ago. But. I asked if they would stop using slurs against the physically disabled now. Because of their words in their recent works. And the fact of the matter is there still all the vile R slurs and cracks at autistic people on their channel right now from all those years ago. Monetised of course. Would that be the same if it was a racial slur? Would a buried apology be enough to continue profiting from such actions for other slurs as is or would the offenses  be censored?

As I stated in another ask I sent them, slurs against the disabled have body counts. People like me were actively killed and in some ways still are. There is no vague history especially when its still happening. We were shuttled into asylums and deliberately infected with TB because of words like lame and imbecile. Eugenics only fell out of favour because of the Nazi associations when the Nazis themselves based their programs on what the rest of Europe and the US were doing at the time. The UK is purging the disabled by cutting benefits to unliveable levels. 6000 people have died so far. Part of Brexit was to avoid EU court rulings about this being a massive human rights violation. The US is constantly targetting the disabled by cutting govt aid and access to healthcare, painting people as huge burdens to tax dollars. The abled don’t get to decide the meaning is gone when I hear earn or die on the daily. When people like me as seen as subhuman.

As for the words themselves, they still target people. Words like idiot and imbecile are thrown at the autistic community a lot. Because obviously you can’t attack them for being autistic. It just has to be reframed as weird and bad and wrong. Words targeting the mentally ill like insane are applied to the shitty actions of perfectly happy people, pushing the blame off them and onto the ill as a scapegoat which is why we have such wonderful things as diagnose Trump. His shitty actions clearly aren’t because he has vile opinions. He must be mentally ill. Lame is used to this day to denote horses who need to be shot because of injuries. That could never carry over to people, right? Nobody wants to kill us because of our disabilities, right?

Would she say gay as a synonym for bad was okay? Thats a trick question because I know she wouldn’t. This is no difference no matter how much anyone wants to say the slurs are divorced from their meaning. “No I mean gay as just a word for bad. Its not homophobic”. This is entire hypocritical. But on to the video. She and and cohorts argued that taking these words away would be too hard to do because it would limit the words they can use which is terribad. That sounds familiar. Almost like what the ‘free speechers’ say about racist/homophobic/sexist/transphobic/every other slur now. Can’t take your precious words away now can we? What about the alt right bringing back a bunch of archaic racial slurs? Is it okay because they are old? Whats the timeline? Is it okay because these ableist slurs are starting to fall out of living memory (Fun joke: they aren’t at all)

Also funny she should say you might look back on this in 20 years and cringe for being on the wrong side of history. Especially when told these words hurt people now and all the slur laden videos from 9 years ago are still making money to this day. This could have been a proactive thing. This could have been thought about, discussed and changed now.

But since I can’t seem to convince these people who laughed at me from a treating me as a human because its the right thing to do standpoint, I’ll try to convince them as a writer. The people laughing about me in the video are all writers. They get paid to write. Their livelihood depends on their ability to find words to express ideas and concepts in creative and interesting ways. What does it say when none of them are willing to give up the low hanging fruit of slurs against the disabled? One could call it laziness. Amateur even. To insult them without mentioning slurs or their looks would be trivial. I could call them personified wet doorknobs. Or an overturned damp rock of a human. Or that their soul runneth over with dumpsterjuice that spills into their prose.

So please, feel free to ask @lindsayetumbls @actuallykylekallgren @hbomberguy and @elisaintime why they get to decide what slurs are okay when a disabled person tells them they are harmful.

[susansontag]

demands to “respect people’s choices” when they’re ‘choosing’ to dehumanise and put themselves in danger is not a morally neutral statement. I believe people should have freedom from practices and people that seek to violate their humanity. it’s not a question of not respecting a person’s individual choice and much more a question of my turning to those seeking to benefit off an individual or group’s dehumanisation and saying: actually, you shouldn’t be allowed to do that.

whenever you defend someone’s right to ‘choose’ something that undermines their humanity, you are really defending the right of people who want to dehumanise and abuse others. you’re telling them it’s okay to want that, if only they can find someone indoctrinated enough, abused enough, or vulnerable enough to say yes. it’s never neutral

the thing that people don’t seem to get is that one can make a ‘free choice’ to do something that ultimately limits their freedom and liberty, or else actively undermines it. people make the ‘free choice’ to join cults, the sex trade, etc. somebody could choose to be someone else’s slave, a ‘choice’ that undermines their humanity and rights. not all ‘choices’ are acceptable; and you wouldn’t be surprised to find they’re rarely choices made free of coercion and indoctrination