#making space for non-normative expressions of rhetoricity

[snapbookreviews]

Fall 2024 Behind-the-Scenes Reading

My Fall behind the scenes reading this year is very much a look a my main research project for this semester, which was on Inuit voices in the Arctic.

You’ll have to forgive this not having a picture. I am in California visiting family and therefore away from all the books I read and the end of my semester was such a mess that I didn’t have the opportunity to do a book photoshoot then. To be fair, a lot of these readings are academic articles, which might make for a boring header image. Once I’m home from California, I’ll see about getting a…

[caustic-splines]

I can be soft and vulnerable, I am willing to let you hurt me because I love you and trust you. I know you are passionate I rediscovered part of the reason why I love you so much. Your love is discrete, inverse pun intended but both homonyms applicable in this analogy. It is private, our unique form of expression

But it is also literally discrete, like recent quantum gravity field theories I may or may not have a hand in. My mind craves clarity, more so, it craves discrete caustic lines an planes. I would like to be like that every day. I want my heart to be in the inner of a particle accelerator bit-west two colliding high energy beams. All the crazy spins and flavor's of normal, charming, and even exotic sub atomic particles smashing apart, smashing together, twirling off in random spirals based on EM fields. That is who I am, not a particle reactor,

but every emergent self and extended phenotype aspect of my projects, world views, emotions, experiences, thoughts and behaviors.

Do you really want to see what I have seen when I was manic, I will make a brief outline, which barely does it justice, nor was the experience worth it in my mind

I saw reality

Across all multi scale layers of objective, subjective, abstract existance. Both perceived and externally existing.

Across all of these non-linear and semi-non empirical scales

Ontology categories of conscious awareness -5 Planc Quantized Wireframe -4 Subatomic Interactions -3 Electron Orbitals -2 Biochemical Interactions -1 Neurological Activity 0 Perception Input and basic awareness/dispersibility [(x n-1…n5) State of dissociation of whatever perceptual order or unconsciousness/dreaming] 1 Awareness of perception and SV 2 Awareness of perception in context or awareness of awareness -Xa Intrapersonal models 3 Awareness of self, regarding one's cognitive topography -Xb Allocentric models 4 Aware of a disruptive axiomatic shift recursively impacting various areas and fidelity of one's consciousness -Xc Global and Orbital Cyberphysical Memetogeographic Space -Xd Cosmology 5 Aware of a fundamental change in perception or PMC affecting POV. Shift in paradigm -Xe Uber Universes/5D+ EGC splines (ego/exo/allo) centric/ totality of EISOA over CT0-9

In the context of modular frames, of which I have objectively real working minimal level of knowledge in all of these domains, some reaching PhD levels of mastery

1 Technology

1 Applied Science/Applied Uses of TSECpm Phenomenon 2 ~Sustainable, Agricultural, Ecological and Environmental 3 Fabrication, Trade/Craft, and Intra/Inter Human Skill/Functionality 4 Military/Security/OMA7 5 Educational, Knowledge, Cognitive, Cybernetics, and Information, DT/PT 6 Electronics, Computers, Software, Spectrum, AI 7 Industries, Material Collection, Cyclical/NA: Supply Chains, Accounting 8 Skills, Fabrication, Synthesis, and Patents, Logistics 9 Civil, Nationality, Era, Civilian, State, and Structural 0 Future Technology/Other

2 Philosophy

1 Logic 2 Epistemology 3 Aesthetics 4 Politics 5 Dialectics, Critical Thinking, and Rhetoric 6 Ethics and Morality 7 Metaphysics and Ontology 8 Meta Linguistics 9 Applied Philosophy 0 Analytic Philosophy/Other

3 Engineering

1 Nuclear Engineering 2 Chemical Engineering 3 Biological Engineering/Medical Engineering 4 Environmental Engineering 5 Systems Engineering  and Cybernetics 6 Electrical Engineering 7 Mechanical Engineering 8 Industrial Engineering  9 Civil Engineering    0 Personal Engineering/Cognitive Engineering/Experience Engineering, ME0002/0013/0034/0049, Other

4 General-Cultural

1 Interactive Mediums/4, 3//Middle World IO MR Interaction/Hobbies/EISOA interactions 2 Geography, Culture, [[SMPH/ME 1/Experiment 0032 TSeCIVii|Experiment 0032 TSeCIVii]] 3 Occult/Niche Allusion/Metaphor 4 Physical, Mental, and Cognitive Skills 5 Day to Day Functionality, House Keeping, BH, and Normative and Exotic Behavior (Anomolies vs Normative Phenomena, timescale/PoF independent) 6 Law, Rules, Conduct, Ethology 7 Finance and Business/Institutions/VSM/States/Governing Bodies 8 Dynamic PPF+/-PoV, People of Interest, UJSF 9 Politics and Society – Collective Conscious Gestalt 0 UM, Pop culture/other, (**(almost) ALL EISOA can be contained in USF(EISOA Correlate))

5 Frameworks

1 Gestalt, Non Gestalt (AS/S)_, Spatial and/or Temporal Patterns, and Non-Modular and Modular Ontology, Shapes, Objects, Sounds,  Qualia Framed Experiences which can be Axiomatized (basically an intersystem link to 1, 1 to enable dual +y/1, 1 functionality) 2 PT/MR Mathematical and Mapping/Fields Competition and Game Theory, NWF (applying [[Experiment 0024 LoUtrix]] to 1, 1) 3 UJSF/Society and Culture/Cyberphysical Environments (EISOA cybersocial considertations) 4 TSECpm, +y/PT, Exocognition/LLM integration 5 Mindmap/MEs, and Modelling, Psychology/EISOA, Thought Traces/2, 5/AE/DABPAx (self imposed 3, 4 for the meta task of utilizing +y effectively) 6 Experiential and PMC/5, x /1, 1/3, 1/2, x/PE (1, 1-2-5-6/2, x subjective experience. MM08, x 7 IESOA, CABS, Frames, (OMA7), Fuzzy Logic, 3, 4/VSMs/SMPH Optimal Scheduling and [[Unsignificant Sentience/Mental Experiments/Experiment 0005 Chewing Gum Loading Dock|Experiment 0005 Chewing Gum Loading Dock]] [[SMPH/ME 1/Experiment 0058 Just in Time 1, 31, 5AE+Y|Experiment 0058 Just in Time 1, 31, 5AE+Y]] HMI workflow (EIOA on IS) 8 Language and Linguistics, Metaphor/SWHs, [[SMPH/ME 1/Experiment 0012 Fractal Cosmic Regression|Experiment 0012 Fractal Cosmic Regression]] 9 Cognition, Learning, and Experience/ 09, x 0 Axiomatic Systems, Perspective Theory/other, PoFs

6 Science

1 Physics 2 Astrophysics and Cosmology 3 Chemistry 4 Biology 5 Interdisciplinary/System Science 6 Health Sciences 7 Earth Sciences 8 Formal Science 9 Social Sciences 0 Other

7 Abstract Constructs, Functions, and Relationships

1 Set Theory 2 Ontology 3 Epistemology 4 Metaphysics 5 Digital/Cognitive Twins 6 Abstract Object Mapping 7 Abstract Object Manipulating 8 Elucidating Abstract Space into IS space and vice versa 9 Metaphysical Abstract Space Workshop, CA 0 Communicable and interactive Abstract Entities/Engineering of the Abstract

At the same time, world building a sci fi universe and multiple systems of systems that would be abstracted and logically patterned into some of the most influential books in human history.

The fourth book? You are a main character you wrote your own part you played. It is probably the first case of hypersituatal fictional historic non fiction that guided the development of humanity culturally and scientifically. I became a living fictive, I had all of my human rights removed, but not my natural rights.

When you see everything, you can change everything

I had reality fuck it's way into my brain and leave gaping wounds that have never healed. I can handle some rough love dear

Maybe one day I will be able to share the light show

[marxism-lesbianism-misandrism]

Not you encouraging rape culture and homophobia telling people that fucking their partner cause they want it even when you don't want to and you don't have to be attracted to your partner to fuck them. This is why we don't let fucking aro/ace into the lgbt community, y'all make us look like idiots.

I'm guessing this is referring to this post?

There's a difference between wanting to have sex and feeling sexual attraction.

"sexual attraction" is a catch-all term for Libido, Sexuality, and Attraction.

Libido is sex drive, Sexuality is how you express yourself through sex, and Attraction is who you find attractive.

Ace people are people who don't have "sexual attraction" in one way or another, and it exists in a spectrum of how much and in which ways.

Some ace people could have low Libido and Sexuality, but still find certain people attractive

Some people could be high Libido, but low Attraction and Sexuality.

Ace people are diverse and it doesn't make you any less Ace if you enjoy things like Masturbation.

It's completely possible for someone to be Ace, but still be partnered and have high Libido (think of Queer-Platonic relationships)

I think you misunderstood the message of the post:

Ace people are often ridiculed and not taken seriously. They are constantly pressured, and asked to prove that they are a Real Ace. Many a-spec people feel pressured to be on the extreme no-sex part of the spectrum and aren't allowed to show any level of non-ace-ness. Being like this is really stressful and makes you go crazy because you don't fit anywhere.

The post is about how the term "AroAce" isn't something you need to earn. AroAce is a way to communicate how you feel about yourself, and you are allowed to be complicated and imperfect and fluid and confusing. I think that sentiment isn't popular enough in queer spaces, but specially in a-spec ones.

Ok now the way you worded this is disgusting

Sex, human relationships, and human wants are complicated. You can want to do sexual activities even if you don't feel sexual attraction (libido, sexuality, attraction).

It is NOT "rape" to have consensual sex. Ace people aren't children, they can make their own decisions, they can know what they want. Please stop devaluing serious terms on BS rhetoric.

I am not saying you should force someone to have sex with you. I am saying that, AS AN ACE PERSON, the ACE PERSON is allowed to be complicated, and are allowed to have sex (with consent.. obviously...??) without being questioned on if they are Actually Ace.

Also, making broad assumptions of a group of people who are loosely connected, is literally the definition of bigotry...? Just because I personally think this, doesn't mean AroAce people are all like me?

And actually hold your horses. LGBTQ isn't an exclusive club only Real Queers get to enter. LGBTQ is a way to identify people who struggle with cis-hetero-normativity. AroAce people are queer because they don't fit into a hetero-normative view (most aren't monogamous, or want sex, most are polyamorous in some way, and they inherently aren't Hetero)

Also where the fuck did Homophobia come into this???????

[ourstarsystem]

My classmates in elementary school explicitly making sex jokes and making fun of me for not getting it + laughing at imagined scenarios of me being exposed to flashing made me FAR more uncomfortable than whatever i saw at pride under the age of 18. in middleschool i went to pride and was vaguely uncomfortable with the partial nudity i saw (which at the most were just men in thongs), but figured it was the price i had to pay to be a part of the event. straight up there weren't even any sexual acts taking place. people wear thongs and bikinis and other risque clothing and sometimes do it to elicit sexual reactions from others because it makes them feel attractive. if you're freaking out about leather and pup hoods even though they're functionally serving the same purpose in this case, your real problem with it is the fact that these aren't normative expressions of sexuality

"what if children see!! how will i explain it to them?" is the same rhetoric conservatives use to argue gay and trans people shouldn't exist in public spaces. plus, pride is not only a celebration of LGBT history which included kink and non-normative sexuality, it also should be considered an act of protest through existing publicly and out and proud. while children are welcome at this event, especially LGBT children who should become familiarized with this history, I think it's ridiculous to make it bend to the whims of what's considered "family friendly" through erasing important aspects of said history. A lot of what happened to us, like the AIDs crisis, was not "family friendly". Hell, WE weren't even considered family friendly, and still aren't.

maybe part of the problem was rebranding pride into a festival thus leading people to believe it should become "family friendly". maybe another part of the problem is assuming that being around sexual expression is inherently traumatizing to children in all circumstances, even though in the case of this topic the worst that may happen is a kid is excited about the doggies at pride or is a bit confused about what's going on. and when they're older, maybe they'd feel a bit embarrassed about it. who knows

"no kink at pride cause its DAMAGING to expose children to sexual things they dont understand" ok but that sure as hell doesnt stop straight people from doing that. in fact I'd argue the leather daddies and puphoods or whatever are generally far tamer than what kids may be exposed to at home on their parents tvs. come on now

[pillowfort-social]

Pride Month 2023

Hi everyone. As you likely know, June is Pride Month.

We’re aware many people in recent years have become wary of corporations that participate in  ‘Rainbow Capitalism’ – i.e., showing nominal support for the LGTBQIA2S+ community during Pride month as basically a marketing tactic, but otherwise failing to stand by the LGTBQIA2S+ community in substantive ways– sometimes even donating to anti-LGTBQIA2S+ organizations and politicians behind the scenes, or walking back their support in the face of opposition. As such, we want our community to know that our commitment to supporting and defending the LGTBQIA2S+ community is sincere and borne of conviction, not just a marketing ploy.

We have seen a dramatic increase in anti-trans legislation in the United States– and even legislation more broadly targeting anyone expressing non-traditional gender norms. Many are rightfully terrified by what is occurring. Make no doubt about it: these attacks are part of a larger attack on the LGTBQIA2S+ & LGTBQIA2S+ BIPOC community, a reactionary response to the progress & freedom that queer & trans people have achieved in recent decades. This legislation has made it difficult for trans and queer people to access healthcare, education, and employment. 

Furthermore, harassment and discrimination seems to be at an all time high because other social media platforms are continuing to allow hate speech and fascist thought freely. Trans and queer folks are having their voices silenced, or simply overridden by algorithms that boost bigoted rhetoric. As a result, we feel it is more important than ever for us to affirm our stance as unequivocally pro-LGTBQIA2S+ and pro-BIPOC. The need for us as a social media network to continue to stand by our LGTBQIA2S+ and LGTBQIA2S+ BIPOC members is obvious; we must be the counterbalance to all that prejudice and bigotry.

Pride Month is certainly a time to celebrate the trans and queer community, but it is also a time to remember the work where it all started. The first Pride was, in fact, a riot in response to systemic brutality against queer and trans people. We encourage you to learn more about the 1969 Stonewall Riots. 

And that’s why we won’t participate in ‘Rainbow Capitalism’. What we say here is from the heart. Our support isn’t a gimmick. 

Pillowfort.social doesn’t allow hate speech. We do not condone hateful rhetoric. We absolutely do not tolerate racism, homophobia, or transphobia. And fascism does not belong here. 

We love and support our LGTBQIA2S+ & LGTBQIA2S+ BIPOC community 365 days a year. Not just one month out of the year.  Pillowfort.social will continue to be a safe space for our trans and queer communities today, tomorrow, and forever. 

A final note: Now more than ever the LGTBQIA2S+ & LGTBQIA2S+ BIPOC Community needs your help to stand up to this wave of attacks. They need allies in the active, not passive, sense– people to stand up toward the danger they are facing. Be an accomplice. That means speaking out against anti-trans, anti-queer, and racist legislation. That means listening to trans, queer, and BIPOC voices. It’s so much more than 30 days of wearing rainbows. You might, if you can be safe doing so, look into participating with your local member groups such as the Equality Federation or the Human Rights Campaign. Organizations such as The Trevor Project are also in need of funding. 

We encourage anyone who wants to promote a local, national ,or international organization working for queer & trans rights to do so in the comments of this post. All hateful comments will be removed. The best first step to oppose anti-LGBTQIA+ legislation is to let the politicians who are promoting these measures know that there are a lot more people fighting against them than they bargained for.

Are you a trans or queer community member in need of aid? Also leave a comment here or here and link ways other users can support you. 

This month find joy in the midst of the storm. Live your life truly out of spite. Don’t let those bastards get you down.

[butchswagcompetition]

I guess you have some points, even though I did mention I thought it was for non-men so like agender is fine

But actually I should have worded it better, it’s more like butch for me is historically a term for queer people who are expected to perform feminity but have a gender expressions that differs from that norm. Maybe it’s a better definition that can join yours idk

Still, thanks for answering even though I was kinda bitchy. Sorry about that

I understand that version of the definition completely, it's absolutely a valid way to look at it. To help you understand what I was talking about a little better; some of the way I see butch men is kind of like them being the equivalent to femme women, so reclaiming something that was expected to be performed a specific way.

When I made the rules I wanted to encourage people to send their headcanons and show this was a trans safe space, especially for multigendered people. Sometimes gender stuff regarding terms just isn't as simple as certain people make it out to be and I've been made frustrated by that over the years. I hope you can understand why I may have been a bit rude to you, the stuff you said is very associated with terf/radfem rhetoric so I went on the defense. I really appreciate you apologizing and considering a compromise, I'm sorry for how I acted towards you as well.

[whitehotharlots]

Associationism: A postmortem for liberal decency

In the last half decade, liberal political writing has undergone a profound seachange. This has infected all strata of media: from braindead outlets like Adbusters, to intentionally digestible pap such as USA Today, to our august papers of record (only two of which remain; one is owned by the world’s richest man), all the way up to self-styled intellectual journals and peer-reviewed scholarship. This change can even be found in literal children’s media and grade school curricula. It deserves to be examined.

For lack of a better term, I refer to this shift as an adoption of associationism. Cause and effect has been abandoned as an analytical frame. The devices that used to be relied upon to adjudicate cause and effect, such as scientific method, statistical analysis, balanced reporting, and even basic “X leads to Y” logic, have likewise been marked as problematic vectors of evil.

Now, you might say this has been a long time coming. Scientific method has been used to design and excuse a bevy of historical wrongs, and balanced reporting is often deployed to obscure morally unambiguous phenomena. Those are fair points, but an astute observer will notice that these adjudication mechanisms are still deployed within liberal discourse, just that they are now used only selectively. Rigor and attention to context are now considered problematic--white, male, cis-normative, whatever--and this allows for otherwise inherently evil mechanisms of truth adjudication to be deployed only when they are guaranteed to enforce the desired narrative, often by writers who are shamelessly fabricating evidence. I mean, why not? It’s fascism to be fact checked, after all. 

Importantly, moral and factual correctness have become collapsed into one another. A statement or belief is True to the extent that it is Right, and vice versa. There exist no confounding variables or contradictory phenomena. The liberal writer’s job, therefore, is to center their own subjective perception (referred to as “lived experience”) or the subjective perception of someone in a supposedly more marginalized position, and then craft a narrative that puts this perception beyond all moral (and therefore factual) reproach. 

The liberal writer’s process is, generally, as follows:

Zero in on a moral outrage of some kind, be it pressing and manifest or petty and completely subjective--everything has the same weight within this frame. 

Narrate this outrage via the “lived experience” of a subject who shares the writer’s opinion.

Cherrypick a handful of statistics, studies, or expert opinions that appear to lend validity to the writer’s understanding of the outrage, being careful to ignore any context or ambiguities that might soften or even fully discredit the outrage. 

Demonize anyone or anything that problematizes--through their opinions or their existence--the writer’s understanding of the outrage. This is achieved typically by associating the problematizer with supposedly empowered groups, who are evil.

Clarify in no uncertain terms: anyone who does not share this outrage is a member of the evil groups, even if they are very literally not a member of those groups. 

This has all been framed as a form of radical moral clarity, providing space for marginalized voices to express their once-unutterable truths, which will in turn bring about the changes this country desperately needs. But, oh no, it turns out that every media organization in this country is stolidly against any actual reform. All of our major presses and news outlets are still owned by austere capitalist psychos, including the aforementioned richest human being in the history of the world. Universities are still MBA-run shitholes that would have students march into incinerators the moment that doing so became more profitable than providing them with resources for identity affirmation. And media aggregation--the manner through which words appear before people’s eyes, 90-odd percent of the time via a screen--is controlled by a small handful of the most megalomaniacal companies on earth. 

So, while we have indeed radically changed our practices of communication and truth adjudication, doing so has not resulted in any radical social changes, or even really any structural changes whatsoever. We’ve just made it radically more difficult to come to an honest understanding of the causes of social malignancies, which in turn has made it radically more easy for the vampires who run this country to make everyone else’s lives radically worse. Radical, dude!

There is no idea so cruel or horrible that it cannot be made to appear progressive under this new frame. Come up with any hypothetical, no matter how evil, and within a few seconds a media-savvy reader should be able to fashion an adequately woke headline: 

Hypothetical examples: 

Abolishing school lunch programs: “Should We Really Be Nourishing White Bodies?”

Pro-female genital mutilation: “The Inherent Transphobia of Those Who Oppose ‘Female Circumcision.’” 

Let’s start using napalm again: “Once Considered an Effective Tool of Precision Warfare, Napalm Was Demonized by Those Who Fear Non-Normative Bodies”

Indian Residential Schools: “Sheltered From Whiteness, These Communities Were a Place Where Native Excellence Could Thrive”

Here we see the Associative aspect of Associationism. Cause and effect no longer exist, and so malignancy is a contagion, the result of the presence of bad people who cause badness. Members of statistically majoritarian groups are presumed to be empowered, and therefore oppressive. And since majoritarian groups contain by definition a majority of people, you will be sure to find their members among the detractors of your position. And even if the members of that majority make up a minority of your detractors, that’s still okay, because context is a white supremacist construct used to obscure moral clarity, and you just so happen to be the arbiter of morality by virtue of being yourself. 

Now, to be fair, not every piece written in this style is done in the pursuit of abject evil. Some are, but a solid plurality are instead written in an attempt to remediate a genuine social wrong. The trouble is, they’re being printed in venues controlled by people who do not desire reform; written in thrall to a political party that does not desire reform; and reliant upon the subjective perspectives of academics, politicians, and NGO bloodsuckers who do not desire reform. This leads, inevitably, to an understanding of social problems that occludes all possibility of reform, only now the discoursal boundaries are so droolingly retarded that you cannot mention the fact that these discussions do not contain even a hypothetical description of how reform might take place.

The point is, radically altering the manner in which social problems are understood, measured, and discussed does not lead--automatically or otherwise--to those social problems being positively addressed. Shifting rhetorical frames can be a precondition for change, yes, but it can just as easily be a means of calcifying the status quo. Unequivocally, our embrace of associationism has accomplished the latter.  

We can easily discern the utility of associationism so far as our elite castes are concerned: it’s getting harder and harder to simply deny the existence of malignancies, so instead let’s just insist that everyone understand them in the dumbest possible way. Their popularity among the non-elites is due primarily to American Puritanism: the more upsetting and uncomfortable something makes us feel, the more we assume it must be working. 

But Puritanism is a two-way street, and the true believers tend to be the ones at the base of the food chain. Regular folx will go through the motions in an earnest desire to do something, anything, to cleanse themselves of whatever horrible brutality video they found on their timeline this morning. They can be annoying, but you can’t blame them. The real malignancy of associationism is how it’s allowed a small group of conniving cocksuckers a means of enhancing their professional status by making their cruelest impulses appear progressive.

I started this essay with the intention of digging deep into Chris Lehmann’s abominable TNR piece in which he insists that the men driven mad and homeless after participating in our genocide in Vietnam were actually doing greviance politics. By the time I finished, he had been very thoroughly destroyed. I still think it’ll be worth the effort to do a deep dive to show the machinations of his horrific essay, but has already gone long so I’ll save that for later this week. 

[spilledreality]

Sporting vs Herding

i.

I wanna talk about two blogposts, Seph's "War Over Being Nice” and Alastair's "Of Triggering & the Triggered." Each lays out the same erisological idea: that there are two distinct modes or cultures of running discourse these days, and understanding the difference is crucial to understanding the content of conversation as much as its form. Let's go.

One style, Alastair writes, is indebted to the Greco-Roman rhetorical and 19th C British sporting traditions. A debate takes place in a "heterotopic" arena which is governed by an ethos of adversarial collaboration and sportsmanship. It is waged in a detached and impersonal manner, e.g. in American debate club, which inherits from these older traditions, you are assigned a side to argue; your position is not some "authentic" expression of self. Alastair:

This form of discourse typically involves a degree of ‘heterotopy’, occurring in a ‘space’ distinct from that of personal interactions.

This heterotopic space is characterized by a sort of playfulness, ritual combativeness, and histrionics. This ‘space’ is akin to that of the playing field, upon which opposing teams give their rivals no quarter, but which is held distinct to some degree from relations between the parties that exist off the field. The handshake between competitors as they leave the field is a typical sign of this demarcation.

All in all, it is a mark against one in these debates to take an argument personally, to allow arguments that happen "in the arena" to leave the arena. This mode of discourse I see exemplified in LessWrong culture, and is, I think, one of the primary attractors to the site.In the second mode of discourse, inoffensiveness, agreement, and inclusivity are emphasized, and positions are seen as closely associated with their proponents.  Alastair speculates it originates in an educational setting which values cooperation, empathy, equality, non-competitiveness, affirmation, and subordination; this may be true, but I feel less confident in it than I am the larger claim about discursive modes. Provocatively, the two modes are dubbed "sporting" and "herding," with all the implications of, on the one hand, individual agents engaged in ritualized, healthy simulations of combat, and on the other, of quasi-non-agents shepherded in a coordinated, bounded, highly constrained and circumscribed epistemic landscape. Recall, if you are tempted to blame this all on the postmodernists, that this is exactly the opposite of their emphasis toward the "adult" realities of relativism, nebulosity, flux. Queer Theory has long advocated for the dissolution of gendered and racial identity, not the reification of identitarian handles we see now, which is QT's bastardization. We might believe these positions were taken too far, but they are ultimately about complicating the world and removing the structuralist comforts of certainty and dichotomy. (Structureless worlds are inherently hostile to rear children in, and also for most human life; see also the Kegan stages for a similar idea.)  

In the erisological vein, Alastair provides a portrait of the collision between the sporting and herding modes. Arguments that fly in one discursive style (taking offence, emotional injury, legitimation-by-feeling) absolutely do not fly in the other:

When these two forms of discourse collide they are frequently unable to understand each other and tend to bring out the worst in each other. The first [new, sensitive] form of discourse seems lacking in rationality and ideological challenge to the second; the second [old, sporting] can appear cruel and devoid of sensitivity to the first. To those accustomed to the second mode of discourse, the cries of protest at supposedly offensive statements may appear to be little more than a dirty and underhand ploy intentionally adopted to derail the discussion by those whose ideological position can’t sustain critical challenge.

ii.

Seph stumbles upon a similar division, though it is less about discursive and argumentative modes, and more about social norms for emotional regulation and responsibility. He calls them Culture A and Culture B, mirroring sporting and herding styles, respectively.

In culture A, everyone is responsible for their own feelings. People say mean stuff all the time—teasing and jostling each other for fun and to get a rise. Occasionally someone gets upset. When that happens, there's usually no repercussions for the perpetrator. If someone gets consistently upset when the same topic is brought up, they will either eventually stop getting upset or the people around them will learn to avoid that topic. Verbally expressing anger at someone is tolerated. It is better to be honest than polite.

In such a culture, respect and status typically comes from performance; Seph quotes the maxim "If you can't sell shit, you are shit." We can see a commonality with sporting in that there is some shared goal which is attained specifically through adversarial play, such that some degree of interpersonal hostility is tolerated or even sought. Conflict is settled openly and explicitly.

In culture B, everyone is responsible for the feelings of others. At social gatherings everyone should feel safe and comfortable. After all, part of the point of having a community is to collectively care for the emotional wellbeing of the community's members. For this reason its seen as an act of violence against the community for your actions or speech to result in someone becoming upset, or if you make people feel uncomfortable or anxious. This comes with strong repercussions—the perpetrator is expected to make things right. An apology isn't necessarily good enough here—to heal the wound, the perpetrator needs to make group participants once again feel nurtured and safe in the group. If they don't do that, they are a toxic element to the group's cohesion and may no longer be welcome in the group. It is better to be polite than honest. As the saying goes, if you can't say something nice, it is better to say nothing at all.

In such a culture, status and respect come from your contribution to group cohesion and safety; Seph cites the maxim "Be someone your coworkers enjoy working with." But Seph's argument pushes back, fruitfully, on descriptions of Culture B as collaborative (which involve high self-assertion); rather, he writes, they are accommodating in the Thomas-Kilmann modes of conflict sense:

iii.

Seph and Alastair both gesture toward the way these modes feel gendered, with Culture A more "masculinized" and Culture B more "feminized."[1] While this seems important to note, given that a massive, historically unprecedented labor shift toward coed co-working has recently occured in the Western world, I don't see much point in hashing out a nature vs. nurture, gender essentialism debate here, so you can pick your side and project it. This is also perhaps interesting from the frame of American feminist history: early waves of feminism were very much about escaping the domestic sphere and entering the public sphere; there is an argument to be made that contemporary feminisms, now that they have successfully entered it, are dedicated to domesticating the public sphere into a more comfortable zone. Culture B, for instance, might well be wholly appropriate to the social setting of a living room, among acquaintances who don't know each other well; indeed, it feels much like the kind of aristocratic parlor culture of the same 19th C Britain that the sporting mode also thrived in, side-by-side. And to some extent, Culture A is often what gets called toxic masculinity; see Mad Men for a depiction.

(On the topic of domestication of the workplace: We've seen an increased blurring of the work-life separation; the mantra "lean-in" has been outcompeted by "decrease office hostility"; business attire has slid into informality, etiquette has been subsumed into ethics, dogs are allowed in the workplace. Obviously these changes are not driven by women's entrance into the workplace alone; the tech sector has had an enormous role in killing both business attire and the home-office divide, despite being almost entirely male in composition. And equally obvious, there is an enormous amount of inter- and intra-business competition in tech, which is both consistently cited by exiting employees as a hostile work environment, and has also managed to drive an outsized portion of global innovation the past few decades—thus cultural domestication is not at all perfectly correlated with a switch from Culture A to B. Draw from these speculations what you will.)

There are other origins for the kind of distinctions Seph and Alastair draw; one worthwhile comparison might be Nietzsche's master and slave moralities. The former mode emphasizes power and achievement, the other empathy, cooperation, and compassion. (Capitalism and communitarianism fall under some of the same, higher-level ideological patterns.) There are differences of course: the master moralist is "beyond" good and evil, or suffering and flourishing, whereas Culture A and B might both see themselves as dealing with questions of suffering but in very different ways. But the "slave revolt in morality" overwrote an aristocratic detachment or "aboveness" that we today might see as deeply immoral or inhuman; it is neither surprising nor damning that a revolting proletariat—the class which suffered most of the evils of the world—would speak from a place of one-to-one, attached self-advocacy. One can switch "sides" or "baskets" of the arena each half or quarter because they are impersonal targets in a public commons; one cannot so easily hold the same attitude toward defending one's home. This alone may indicate we should be more sympathetic to the communitarian mode than we might be inclined to be; certainly, those who advocate and embody this mode make plausible claims to being a similar, embattled and embittered class. A friend who I discussed these texts with argued that one failure mode of the rationalist community is an "unmooring" from the real concerns of human beings, slipping into an idealized, logical world modeled on self-similarity (i.e. highly Culture A, thinking over feeling in the Big 5 vocabulary), in a way that is blind to the realities of the larger population.

But there are also grave problems for such a discursive mode, especially when it becomes dominant. Because while on the surface, discursive battles in the sporting mode can appear to be battles between people, they are in reality battles between ideas.

iv.

As Mill argued in On Liberty, free discourse is crucial because it acts as a social steering mechanism: should we make a mistake in our course, freedom of discourse is the instrument for correcting it. But the mistake of losing free discourse is very hard to come back from; it must be fought for again, before other ideals can be pursued. 

Moreover, freedom of discourse is the means of rigorizing ideas before they are implemented, such as to avoid catastrophe. Anyone familiar with James Scott's Seeing Like A State, or Hayek's arguments for decentralized market intelligence, or a million other arguments against overhaulism, knows how difficult it is to engineer a social intervention that works as intended: the unforeseen, second-order effects; our inability to model complex systems and human psychology. Good intent is not remotely enough, and the herding approach cannot help but lower the standard of thinking and discourse emerging from such communities, which become more demographically powerful even as their ideas become worse (the two are tied up inextricably).

The fear of conflict and the inability to deal with disagreement lies at the heart of sensitivity-driven discourses. However, ideological conflict is the crucible of the sharpest thought. Ideological conflict forces our arguments to undergo a rigorous and ruthless process through which bad arguments are broken down, good arguments are honed and developed, and the relative strengths and weaknesses of different positions emerge. The best thinking emerges from contexts where interlocutors mercilessly probe and attack our arguments’ weaknesses and our own weaknesses as their defenders. They expose the blindspots in our vision, the cracks in our theories, the inconsistencies in our logic, the inaptness of our framing, the problems in our rhetoric. We are constantly forced to return to the drawing board, to produce better arguments.

And on the strength of sporting approaches in rigorizing discourse:

The truth is not located in the single voice, but emerges from the conversation as a whole. Within this form of heterotopic discourse, one can play devil’s advocate, have one’s tongue in one’s cheek, purposefully overstate one’s case, or attack positions that one agrees with. The point of the discourse is to expose the strengths and weaknesses of various positions through rigorous challenge, not to provide a balanced position in a single monologue

Thus those who wish us to accept their conceptual carvings or political advocacies without question or challenge are avoiding short-term emotional discomfort at the price of their own long-term flourishing, at the cost of finding working and stable social solutions to problems. Standpoint epistemology correctly holds that individuals possess privileged knowledge as to what it's like (in the Nagel sense) to hold their social identities. But it is often wrongly extended, in the popular game of informational corruption called "Telephone" or "Chinese Whispers," as arguing that such individuals also possess unassailable and unchallengeable insight into the proper societal solutions to their grievances. We can imagine a patient walking into the doctor's office; the doctor cannot plausibly tell him there is no pain in his leg, if he claims there is, but the same doctor can recommend treatment, or provide evidence as to whether the pain is physical or psychosomatic.A lack of discursive rigour would not be a problem, Alastair writes, "were it not for the fact that these groups frequently expect us to fly in a society formed according to their ideas, ideas that never received any rigorous stress testing."

v.

As for myself, it was not too long ago I graduated from a university in which a conflict between these modes is ongoing. We had a required course called

Contemporary Civilization

, founded in the wake of World War I, which focused on the last 2,000 years of philosophy, seminar-style: a little bit of introductory lecture, but most of the 2 x 2-hour sessions each week were filled by students arguing with one other. In other words, its founding ethos was of sporting and adversarial collaboration.We also had a number of breakdowns where several students simply could not handle this mode: they would begin crying, or say they couldn't deal with the [insert atmosphere adjective] in the room, and would either transfer out or speak to the professor. While they were not largely representative, they required catering to, and no one wished to upset these students. I have heard we were a fortunate class insofar as we had a small handful of students willing to engage sporting-style, or skeptical a priori of the dominant political ideology at the school. When, in one session, a socialist son of a Saudi billionaire, wearing a $10,000 watch and a camel-hair cashmere sweater, pontificated about "burning the money, reverting to a barter system, and killing the bosses," folks in class would mention that true barter systems were virtually unprecedented in post-agricultural societies, and basically unworkable at scale. In other classes, though, when arguments like these were made—which, taken literally, are logically irrational, but instead justify themselves through sentiment, a legitimation of driving emotion rather than explicit content, in the Culture B sense—other students apparently nodded sagely from the back of the room, "yes, and-ing" one another til their noses ran. Well, I wanted to lay out the styles with some neutrality, but I suppose it's clear now where my sympathies stand.

[1] It should go without saying, but to cover my bases, these modes feeling "feminized" or "masculinized" does not imply that all women, or women inherently, engage in one mode while all men inherently engage in another. Seph cites Camille Paglia as an archetypal example of a Culture A woman, and while she may fall to the extreme side of the Culture A mode, I'd argue most female intellectuals of the 20th C (at least those operated outside the sphere of feminist discourse) were strongly sporting-types: Sontag, for instance, was vociferous and unrelenting. 

[thevagueambition]

I see so many transmasc people online expressing this guilt complex about how to behave as a non-woman around women but honestly like... a woman's theoretical comfort isn't more important than your actual comfort. Obviously if you have a credible reason to believe your behaviour is causing an issue, you should change it, but this is true in general. It's not a gendered phenomenon. You don't need to preemptively step back because you think women might feel this or that way, or because you don't want to take up space or whatever. This guilt complex exists in some leftist cis guys as well – it is sometimes an abuse tactic used against men in these spaces, in fact – so it's not just a transmasculine trend, but it is particularly pronounced among transmasculine people. Partly for obvious reasons but the influence of radfem rhetoric on many young afab trans folk really cannot be overstated.

At the end of the day, it comes from the same gender essentialism as radfem ideology and that gender essentialism ultimately derives from dominant cultural norms. Radfem rhetoric has infused people with the belief that men are, in general, bad, but if you toe the line well enough, you might get to be "one of the good ones." Motivated by this desire, some people become hugely invested in denigrating their own maleness and modifying their behaviour to service (what they think) women want/need. This ultimately derives from cultural norms about women needing male help and protection (e.g. chivalry) as well as the emphasis on stoicism as a masculine virtue ("your comfort is more important than mine because I am make and should just ensure it"). Which frankly can be a part of the toxic masculinity these people are so afraid of engaging in – male stoicism is why you get men using their girlfriend as a therapist and ultimately why male suicide rates are higher.

Radfem rhetoric sets up sexism as a dichotomy of good and evil, with the evil men oppressing the innocent women. Reality is far messier and more complex than just two categories. The truth is that everyone is hurt by sexism. Transphobia derives from sexism, as does homophobia. The interplay of sexism with race and class is incredibly complex. You know very little about someone's life if the only thing you know about them is their gender. There are certain experiences they are more likely to have been exposed to, but frankly, often the statistics for all trans people are even worse in those areas.

And I'm not saying that trans men can't be misogynistic, obviously we can be, and yes there are cases where it's possible for a trans man to hold power over a cis woman, but quite frankly? The notion that cis women don't hold power over trans men just as often, if not more often, particularly considering the age ranges of the people who tend to have this mentality (ie likely amount of time spend interacting with cis women while passing), is honestly silly to me.

[anniekoh]

Disability Rhetoric

by Jay Timothy Dolmage (2014)

Disability Rhetoric is the first book to view rhetorical theory and history through the lens of disability studies. Traditionally, the body has been seen as, at best, a rhetorical distraction; at worst, those whose bodies do not conform to a narrow range of norms are disqualified from speaking. Yet, Dolmage argues that communication has always been obsessed with the meaning of the body and that bodily difference is always highly rhetorical. Following from this rewriting of rhetorical history, he outlines the development of a new theory, affirming the ideas that all communication is embodied, that the body plays a central role in all expression, and that greater attention to a range of bodies is therefore essential to a better understanding of rhetorical histories, theories, and possibilities.

Two books I just learned about that I’d love to read.

I learned about Jay Dolmage through a talk given by Drew Holladay at a UMBC conference on Inclusive Language.  From an interview with Dolmage about the book Disability Rhetoric, on how we might “claim new models of communication and artistry” and which writers and artists are already doing this

Lots and lots and lots of them! Eli Clare, Margaret Price, Anne Finger, Jim Ferris, Alison Kafer, Melanie Yergeau — these are just a few of the people who through the actual way that they write about/through disability create new models. But I also think of artists like Riva Lehrer, or performance groups like Sins Invalid. I really could go on and on and on. It is very strange to create a list like this, though — because people have been doing this forever — and there are many, many more people doing this now than I can list. And I really strongly think that when we begin to look for the body, and in particular when we begin to make space for non-normative bodies and minds, we start to communicate in powerfully different ways. For instance, my brother Matt used a combination of speech and sign and a synthesizer to communicate. Because he only had full use of one hand, we would often ask me to “complete” signs with him by touching hands. That taught me more about what communication really is than any book I could ever read.

Disability in Science Fiction: Representations of Technology as Cure edited by Kathryn Allan (2013)

In this groundbreaking collection, twelve international scholars – with backgrounds in disability studies, English and world literature, classics, and history – discuss the representation of dis/ability, medical "cures," technology, and the body in science fiction.

From a review in Strange Horizons

The final section? Allan has collected the most interesting—the most thought-provoking—articles of the entire volume into Cure Narratives For The (Post)Human Future. If I had to single any one of them out, it would be Canavan’s, which discusses fatal genetic disorders in light of some of Octavia Butler’s stories.

Table of Contents

PART I: THEORIZING DISABILITY IN SCIENCE FICTION

1. Tools to Help You Think: Intersections between Disability Studies and the Writings of Samuel R. Delany; Joanne Woiak and Hioni Karamanos 2. The Metamorphic Body in Science Fiction: From Prosthetic Correction to Utopian Enhancement; António Fernando Cascais 3. Freaks and Extraordinary Bodies: Disability as Generic Marker in John Varley’s “Tango Charlie and Foxtrot Romeo;” Ria Cheyne 4. The Many Voices of Charlie Gordon: On the Representation of Intellectual Disability in Daniel Keyes’s Flowers for Algernon; Howard Sklar

PART II: HUMAN BOUNDARIES AND PROSTHETIC BODIES

5. Prosthetic Bodies: The Convergence of Disability, Technology and Capital in Peter Watts’ Blindsight and Ian McDonald’s River of Gods; Netty Matar 6. The Bionic Woman: Machine or Human?; Donna Binns 7. Star Wars, Limb-loss, and What it Means to be Human; Ralph Covino 8. Animal and Alien Bodies as Prostheses: Reframing Disability in Avatar and How to Train Your Dragon; Leigha McReynolds

PART III: CURE NARRATIVES FOR THE (POST)HUMAN FUTURE

9. “Great Clumsy Dinosaurs”: The Disabled Body in the Posthuman World; Brent Walter Cline 10. Disabled Hero, Sick Society: Sophocles’ Philoctetes and Robert Silverberg’s The Man in the Maze; Robert W. Cape, Jr. 11. “Everything is always changing”: Autism, Normalcy, and Progress in Elizabeth Moon’s The Speed of Dark and Nancy Fulda’s “Movement;” Christy Tidwell 12. Life without Hope? Huntington’s Disease and Genetic Futurity; Gerry Canavan

[morlock-holmes]

So, my experience has been that even in super-woke spaces, there is strong pressure towards gender conformity for men, and the pressure is exerted in exactly the same way as it is in non-woke spaces. Or, hell, sometimes in genuinely much more regressive ways. Now, here’s the thing. It’s not that the skills that men are expected to display are the same skills as the ones men are expected to display in other contexts [Being able to explain why “All lives matter” is actually a racist statement is more important than being able to change your oil, insert your own stereotypes here].  It’s just... Well, start there. Part of being a real man is to be skilled. You earn manhood by constantly demonstrating the skills that the community finds important. And you must demonstrate those skills with a great deal of confidence, or, rather, lack of confidence must be expressed in very specific ways in very specific contexts. You might be able to get away with talking about how much you struggle with internalized toxic masculinity, but a little of that goes a long way and if you aren’t careful the crowd can turn on you in an instant.

In general, I’ve found that men expressing general lack of confidence at the wrong time really does throw people off their game (And this includes both men and women, avowed feminists or no). Anyway, none of that is awful, maybe; it is good to practice useful skills and good to have justified confidence in yourself. But it is also very important to demonstrate your manliness by constantly comparing yourself favorably to others who have failed to be men. It is very important, as a white man in these spaces, to be able to laugh at and make jokes about “Nice Guys” or “Mediocre White Men” or “Bros” or whichever the next version is. 

This is expressed in very meta, “I am wiser than you because I know that I’m not wise” fashion, and actually is a pretty difficult tightrope to walk. I’m writing this because I saw a reference to some old “Books Every White Man Owns” article on The Toast, and the purpose of articles like that in woke white male culture is complex. You have to admit that you see enough of yourself in it to show that you aren’t oblivious like the guy the article was written about, but not so much of yourself that you actually think the joke isn’t funny.  You are constantly asked to denigrate a certain class of failed men in order to demonstrate your own bona fides, kind of like the way regressive dudes need to prove they aren’t gay all the time. The worst, absolutely the worst move you can make in these spaces is to identify too much with those failed men. You absolutely never say, “Uh, actually my dad gave me ‘Catcher in the Rye’ and it really meant a lot to me” because that’s basically social suicide. And the real issue is that this is a subtextual norm. The surface goals of woke spaces are that we’re all here to abandon outmoded patriarchal thought patterns and create new ways of occupying gender. Not only that, but going “I’m a woman, I’ve had that experience, and it’s not funny” or “I’m gay, I’ve had that experience, and it’s not funny” can be a social power move. I’ve said this before, but I was part of a movie discussion group which was A) Big on suicide prevention and mental illness awarenes, and B) Loved to make jokes about how many lame movies there were that expected us to sympathise with sad middle class white dudes. The worst idea I had there was trying to go, “As somebody who has been suicidal, I don’t like all these jokes about how nobody wants to hear some white guy whining, it doesn’t make me feel like it would be safe to open up” So what you end up with is a culture that, in some ways, can feel like it is exerting even more pressure on you to be a man. In my experience you end up with a class of high status men who pick up on this dynamic without having to be told, and a largely invisible underclass of clueless dorks like me, who take the surface rhetoric seriously, attempt to actually interrogate what pressures the community is putting on men, and then get smacked down because they’re being humorless and spoiling everybody’s good fun. And then that underlcass starts going to Jordan Peterson lectures or getting really interested in gamergate.

[elegantshapeshifter]

“Polytheists face discrimination in western societies because of the West’s fundamental disagreement with what is considered an “acceptable” religion. An essential component of this discrimination is, paradoxically, Western secularism. Though ostensibly Western secularism pretends to treat all religions equally, it in truth has been significantly shaped by a background of a monotheistic cultural background and infused with it, which profoundly influences what the West will consider an “acceptable” religion. Because of this, it inherently grants favor towards the monotheist theological paradigm by forcing “unsavory” or culturally distinct practices out of the public. This essentially makes secularism a tool by monotheists to deny an understanding of actual religious plurality, and with that, force religions deemed “deviant” (e.g., polytheistic religions) which tenant in Western society to fundamentally change to better suit the public eye.

Polytheism as “Abhorrent” in Secular Space

Though the very term polytheism goes as far back as Aeschylus (Suppliant Women 424f), it is likewise regularly defined externally and instilled with the monotheist overculture, as seen with the cases of Philo of Alexandria. And much later, it arrived in the early modern West as a slur, mostly by predominantly Protestant countries, where it can be contended that the disgust of the supposed deviancy of polytheism is immensely increased so much so that the term is used as a weapon, seen in the term’s entrance into modern English, where it was used as an anti-papist slur against Jesuits operating in Asia in the 17th century (Page duBois 2014, 19).

One of the most notorious methods of disenfranchising polytheism is enforced is through the use of secular space. This is discussed by Judith Butler in her book The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere, which highlights how the public space of religious discourse is embedded by an Abrahamic foundation, and is inherently used to reinforce a monotheistic religious paradigm (most particularly of Christianity). There exists an unfair advantage given to monotheists in all aspects of western society, much of which is protected because of secularism; for example in 1833 a judicial precedent was established in the United States by Joseph Story which privileged and encouraged Christianity (Joseph Story, 693-703), while in 1892 the Supreme Court made a decision which created a rhetoric still espoused today which identified the United States as a “Christian Nation” (143 U.S. 457).

Saba Mahmood suggests in her work Is Critique Secular? that despite what many come to believe about secularism (being the separation of a religious body and the state), history often shows that secularism acts as a force for regulation and reformation of religious beliefs in light of what the overculture considers what a “proper religion” is. This is accomplished by the establishment of what is considered “religious” by the society, which is normalized and carefully maintained with an eye for internal consistency. In truth, Western secularism isn’t genuinely pluralistic. Western secularism arose out of Protestantism, and regardless of its allusions to the contrary, it still privileges a single religious mode of thought by driving practices deemed unsavory or culturally distinct out of the public eye. Everything that is regarded as foreign to the overculture of the perceived “norm” is deemed deviant and inappropriate, as they are not viewed as being consistent with the overculture’s concept of what is considered properly “religion,” and thus pushed into the private sphere, because it is not adequate for public consumption. This, in essence, bars any possible understanding outside of what is deemed “the norm,” which results in the public sphere having a fundamental lack of pluralistic understanding of religion that brings into account the differences and variations in religious concerns and cultural expressions. It masks religious tolerance — more aptly mere tolerance — only if it exits the public eye, and prevents the chance of actual religious plurality from taking root. Instead, religion is ostracized, regulated, and ultimately, reshaped and remade through the practice of law.

Yes, most countries in the West, especially in the Americas, follow a concept of the separation of Church and State. However, it’s essential to keep in mind that this achievement, and by extension the “public sphere” concerning religious discourse, is overwhelmingly a monotheist achievement. It isn’t merely that the majority of the populace maintains a religious affiliation with a monotheistic religion, but rather the very legal foundation of this culture is established on Abrahamic Monotheistic dominance. This fundamentally means the public will presuppose what is properly “religious,” and blatantly reaffirm the theological paradigm that is dominant in the overculture while ostensibly putting forward a notion of tolerance.

Because of this, a boundary is created between the “secular” and “religious” space that is artificial and inherently untenable for polytheists, and even more broadly theists who merely hold an immanent view of the divine (a view not only common among polytheists, but also frequent among non-Protestant sects of Christianity). The divine— and to that extent, the practice of the religion— penetrates aspects of daily, even mundane life, which inevitably includes public life. Religion isn’t merely confined to the temples— it can be part of a lifestyle, and the separation currently existent in western secularism isn’t simply unnatural; it is ultimately disenfranchising.

This marginalization produces an end result that makes it difficult, if not impossible, for cohabitation while maintaining religious integrity and practice. It leaves ultimately two options to a religious tradition which lies outside the norm of the overculture. To either continue to be marginalized in the grand scale of society, or alternatively, to conform to the overculture and model itself after the ideal “minority religion,” and with that willingly submit itself to a systemic disenchantment of religious identity and spirituality, which doesn’t recognize nor embrace their theological paradigm. And this is precisely what many polytheistic traditions submit themselves to in the west.

India is a shining star that should be looked up to— a place which holds a heritage of multifaceted religious diversity and has never held a dogma of an exclusive truth. Indian society defines the concept of secularism as religious pluralism, which aims to accept and integrate diversity both in private and public life. It’s not the separation of a religious body and state, but rather the acknowledgment of the state’s multireligious nature (Page duBois 2014, 8). In stark contrast, western nations follow a skewed form of secular doctrine which only ends up effectively engaging in state-sponsored religious oppression in which their definition of what is “religion” inherently privileges monotheistic Abrahamic religions. The failing of contemporary western society to tolerate – let alone embrace – any notions of pluralistic polytheism are abundantly clear.

Notions of what is “properly religious”

During the early 20th-century, C.S. Lewis released his autobiography Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life and coined the term “chronological snobbery.” This is a fallacy that indicates that the intellectual and cultural capacities of an earlier time can be positioned as inherently inferior to that of the present, merely by a view of the current time being actively experienced and the past, in contrast, as outdated. This is precisely what the hegemonic coercion of Abrahamic monotheism does in the west to shape the public perception of what is “acceptable,” and is even dominant in Lewis’ own work with his concept of “ethical monotheism.”

This fallacious notion of linear development in religion has always existed. The term Pagan itself was initially something that was synonymous with “rustic” or “rural.” The term was later adopted by Christians, who primarily established centers in urban areas, as a derogatory term against polytheists who lived in the more “rural areas” of society, and thus kept their traditions. This term was consequently weaponized and used to refer to polytheists as “out of reach,” with a strong implication of being backward or primitive (Michael York 2003, 6).

Western notions of what is properly “religious,” and with that the notion of “polytheism” being synonymous with “primitivism”, were engraved into the West with the dominance of Abrahamic monotheism. The word polytheism would be used in Christian schisms as a slur invoked against opponents (Page duBois 2014, 31). Western convictions would carry into Western colonial expansion, most particularly damaging in regions like India during the British Raj, where the British came to be appalled by the immeasurable diversity in the continent and thus imposed a uniformity through an Anglicized Indian elite that would shape much of what became modern Hinduism (Wendy Doniger 2010, 7-9). Also in the British Raj during the 19th-century a number of missionaries, most notably the infamous John Wilson, harassed Zoroastrians and implied that they were primitive by referring to them as polytheists (Jenny Rose 2012, 205).

Western (particularly Protestant) notions of what’s “religious” was the metric scale of which other cultures were judged from, and this would have grand influence when it came to foreign policy. When the Americans used the threat of armed force against Japan to open the country 1853 ACE, it imposed a list of treaties and demands, among which was a freedom of religion that forced the country to contest with western ideas of religion. This signifcantly altered the idea of religion in Japan. Japan never even had a word for “religion” in the notion much of the Protestant West understood it; religion was simply part of life. Once considered an extension of Buddhism, religion in Japan was profoundly shaped by western ideas, which led to the rise of Shintoism as an independent faith (Jason Ananda Josephson 2012, 98).

The notion of polytheism being a sort of spiritual archaism persisted into the era of early psychology, where certain psychologists who were inspired by Boyer, Hegel, Wellhausen, et al., tried to put forward a notion of linear human development in the progression of religion, which would culminate into an ultimate “end result.” Here, they position animism and polytheism as archaic religious “primitivism,” which would naturally and ultimately yield to more “developed” expressions of religion, until something akin to C.S. Lewis’ “ethical monotheism” is achieved. This attempt at “naturalizing” monotheism is oftentimes even furthered by post-monotheistic Atheistic writers who, having only been exposed to the monotheistic theological paradigm due to a lack of any actual religious plurality in Western secular space, will claim that the ultimate goal of a fully mature society is post-monotheistic secularism (Page duBois 2014, 12).

These long-held views of what is properly “religious” have been so engraved into western society that it results in the west consistently disenfranchising polytheists at an alarming frequency. When these views are coupled with the deeply ingrained colonialist attitudes of the West, it penetrates the public reception to polytheistic theology, even in the contemporary “tolerant” West, and causes polytheism to be perceived as inferior, archaic and ignorant. The apparent claims of tolerance and modernity expose themselves to be fictitious, and this can have a strongly negative influence on polytheistic communities, leading them to hold onto a sort of baggage which causes them engage in reductionist efforts to make the belief in many Gods as close to monotheism as possible to be more comfortable to westerners. This normalizes conformity to the monotheistic overculture in the West.

Those who live within or are profoundly influenced by the monotheistic overculture in the west will start with baggage by default, simply by being a part of that culture, regardless of your personal or familial beliefs. Because of this, connecting to a religion that doesn’t adhere to the monotheistic overculture’s paradigm can be a bit like learning a second language, but sometimes accidentally replacing words with words from the language you were raised with, or making your sentences function like the language you were raised with, even though your second language doesn’t function like that. This is the essence of baggage, and it can drastically effect polytheistic communities who come under influence of the monotheistic overculture, resulting in conformity to the Western perception of what is properly “religious.”

Effect on Polytheistic Diaspora

Even some of the worlds oldest polytheistic religions find themselves changing drastically when influenced by the monotheistic overculture, and will often hold onto baggage which distances them from traditional practices and beliefs. Two of the most notable examples are Hinduism and Zoroastrianism.

Hinduism is one of the world’s oldest continuously living polytheistic religions. As already stated, however, much of modern day Hinduism came to be directed by an Anglicized Indian class during the British Raj (Wendy Doniger 2010, 7-9). This influence is exemplified in Hindu diaspora in the west, however, where it is often forced to struggle with and ultimately conform to the hegemony of monotheistic overculture in the West. Prema Kurien’s work Place at the Multicultural Table: The Development of an American Hinduism reveals the pressures on American Hindus to adapt their religion to the “model minority,” which can encompass both religion and ethnicity. These pressures culminate into the assimilation of Hindus into a Western culture, in both the colonial and immigrant contexts, through an artificial, organized Hinduism based in both text and history, which is profoundly evocative of the more accepted monotheism present in the colonial overculture (e.g., Arya Samaj)

Often Western Hindus will try to make their polytheistic values more digestible to Westerners, underplaying the individuality of the Gods and putting forth a claim that Hinduism is truly monotheistic, or that all people worship the same God.

An additional example is found in contemporary Zoroastrianism, another one of the world’s oldest continuously living polytheistic traditions, with a tradition of worshiping Ahura Mazda, the highest God, and the Yazatas, the Good Gods, under Him. This, however, has been long since mutilated— at least among the Parsi. Though the monotheizing of Zoroastrianism can be traced as beginning during the Islamic Invasion of Iran, it wasn’t until the British Raj did Zoroastrianism become forced to adapt (Jenny Rose 2012, 23). At this time, seeing the wealthy Zoroastrian Parsi community (Jenny Rose 2012, 23), Anglicans attempted to harass and convert the Zoroastrians and launched a smear campaign against the religion for being “polytheistic” (Jenny Rose 2012, 205). In an effort to relieve themselves, Zoroastrians adopted a western reinterpretation of their religion by 18th-century German linguist, Martin Haug, who imposed sole monotheism. Following Zoroastrian conformity to the overculture, the Anglicans stopped bothering them so much once they adopted monotheism and went so far as to adopt angelic choir.

An ignorance towards the worship of good Gods, the Yazatas, which translates as “those worthy of worship,” is present in the public face of contemporary Zoroastrianism, and translations often write them off as “angels” in the monotheistic sense. Furthermore, many contemporary Zoroastrians want to claim this prize of “oldest monotheism” to simultaneously protect themselves from and also shame their Abrahamic neighbors, despite a history of worshiping many Gods as well as the prophet Zoroaster clearly referencing to and giving praise for other Gods in the Gathas (Yasna 30:9).

Effect on Polytheists in Contemporary Paganism

Considering that some of the worlds largest and oldest polytheistic religions find themselves substantially altered to adapt to a western monotheistic overculture, there isn’t any doubt that contemporary Paganism also faces grave issues with baggage, especially since it’s homegrown. The disgust and dismissal of religious theology and experience is likewise a prevalent force that Contemporary Pagans in the west face every day. Since day one, Contemporary Paganism has understood the struggles of being a religious minority, with proof of its “legitimacy” being frequently demanded. Quite often an expectation of privatization exists for economic and safety reasons, especially in regions of the West where evangelical monotheisms hold hegemony.

Furthermore, Contemporary Paganism was born in a monotheistic, largely Protestant West. If we mark Gerald Gardner’s foundation of British Traditional Witchcraft as the beginning of modern Paganism, or look to the “early Paganisms” of the Romantic and Victorian eras, then it arose out of Protestant overculture. This can be coupled with the fact that not many of us were “born into” Paganism. Most of us began as some sort of Abrahamic religion– and even if we were born into a family that was outright atheist, we weren’t born in a vacuum– we were under constant influence of that monotheist mode of thought so ingrained into western culture, and likewise both externally and internally use it as a metric to measure all other things, whether that be ethics, morality, actions, or beliefs. Due to all of this, Contemporary Pagans can sometimes come with some type of baggage and hold the same prejudices and biases, and itself produce an environment hostile to Polytheists.

The topic is addressed wonderfully in TheLettuceMan’s post on this very topic, but overall this exact same fallacious gargle of linear human development is regurgitated by certain individuals who try to latch onto Paganism such as John Halstead and Mark Green, except holding a notion of a non-particular atheistic post-Christianity rather than C.S. Lewis’ conception of an ethical monotheism. The same notions of ethnocentric pomposity and chronological snobbery are assumed by these “authors,” who uphold a conviction that the modern period is superior to the past, and that looking back is nonsensical and applying anything from it is inappropriate. By large, these atheistic “humanistic Pagans,” who try to downplay the existence of the Gods as mere archetypes or thoughtforms, are the result of a Protestant overculture that preaches a mere toleration of polytheism within Contemporary Paganism. They espouse the exact same attitudes that are repeated over and over again by an overwhelming monotheistic Protestant West, and serve as nothing more but another example of Monotheistic overculture.

Conclusion

It’s important to recognize the problems of approaching secularism as a state-religious apparatus. Instead of secularism being a space of no Gods, which only enforces an overculture by forcing anything outside of the theological paradigm into the private sector, we should look to the example of multicultural India and transform secular space into a heterogenous area of many Gods, which truly functions as a way to manage and integrate with diversity and allow for true religious plurality, rather than enforce a hegemonic overculture. It’s imperative to recognize, address, and extricate ourselves from the baggage of the monotheistic overculture, and instead try to embrace a religious climate that we’re more comfortable with.”

[mari-matsu]

Shelter Chapter 1

        “S-stand,” Nagisa’s less than commanding voice stuttered in the room and you nimbly got up to your feet. Handling the gun in your hands with little effort, you observed as the others similarly shot up from their seats with their own weapon aimed at the teacher. 

        “Attention,” A curt silence enveloped the room and you took the time to analyze each and everyone’s serious expression that was etched on their faces. Calmly, you rolled your eyes to the direction of the teacher. His elated grin hadn't faltered at the sight of all the artillery.

        “Bow!” At the word, a barrage of pink bullets rained down on him. Little pellets of Anti-Teacher bounced harmlessly off the board as he dodged in a speed that was classified as Mach 20, a speed no human will ever be able to reach. But for this teacher, it was a breeze, easily creating three afterimages that had left all of you speechless on his first day here. Because, after all, he wasn't even human.

        You and your new class had the great privilege to be taught by a super being, an incredibly fast, amazingly powerful, and highly intelligent... octopus. That's right. A bright yellow, depending on his mood, octopus with slithering tentacles and an actually friendly grin. He was introduced by the Government Military Defense as a criminal capable of destroying the Earth. The evidence: This teacher was responsible for the damage made to the moon, which was now a permanent crescent.

        A few months prior to this day, all of the inhabitants of Earth witnessed an explosion that sent chills down everyone's spines. The moon had shattered. Pieces of the satellite had rained down on the lakes, oceans, and land, and there was a moment of pure panic, fear, and curiosity. What just happened? No one knew the answer and people wondered for weeks as to what occurred. Why did the moon break like that? What was the cause of it? Was it a natural occurrence... or was it an effect of something man made?

        The answer came to a select group of people. On the day you came back to school to start a new grade, you and your classmates were met with a surprise. The Military had dropped by to give everyone in your class an assignment: To assassinate your new teacher.  To be quite honest, your classmates were surprised to hear that news but the shock deepened when the Military introduced the target. It was immediately a mind boggling first day, because how on Earth were junior high students supposed to kill something like that? Everyone was so perplexed at the idea, but was easily compelled by the reward money that came with the success of the octopus' death. So your classmates got use to the odd setting, and quickly became accustomed to a gun and a knife.

        An assassination attempt was always done daily.

        “Good morning,” Your non-human teacher called out, his wide smile never leaving his face, “I’ll be taking attendance now, so please, fire all you like.” The teacher you’ve come to known then began roll call as your classmates answered, reloaded, and animatedly fired at the man.

        You, in the back, waited patiently for your name to be called as your finger rested lightly on the trigger. The specially designed AK-47 was leaning on your shoulder, and a stack of Anti-Teacher ammo sat unused behind your desk, collecting dust since you first received it. You were just waiting as others unloaded multiple clips on your teacher, waiting without participating a bit in this deadly activity.

        “(Y/N)-san?” At the mention of your name, you melodiously announced your presence. Your teacher's blurry image seemed to incline closer as he waved a shaking tentacle to his ear, a motion for you to speak louder. “I’m sorry, could you say that again? Like I said before, I can’t hear anything with all this gunfire.” You raised your tone and responded with yet another chipper sound and the grin reappeared on his circular face. He continued down the line as others grunted in response and frustration, and before you knew it, every name was called.  “Alright then! Everyone’s on time, I see. Excellent that makes me very happy.” He said just as the guns stopped firing. As if to clarify how happy he was, his bright yellow face shifted to a scarlet one.

        Blinking rather evenly at the color shift, you watched your classmates catch their breath, exhausted. “He’s too fast,” You heard one of your classmate and friend, Rio Nakamura, complain. Her long blonde hair swayed to the side as she slumped in her seat, defeated.

        Isogai, the male class representative and another friend, then noted, “So even the whole class at once can’t bring him down?” His golden eyes were always kind; however, today it was slightly dim as he heaved a sigh. "It feels like we're getting nowhere again." He commented but he wore a gentle smile.

        “Too bad, huh, not one of your bullets hit me today either.” The teacher emphasized and he then went on explaining about the little things that counted in assassination. This was the norm. A lecture in English, History, as well as the art of assassination. These were lessons that only your class was privileged to have, and you actively took in every word. It is, after all, something you must study on. “In addition to those, (Y/N)-san,” You automatically hummed at the abrupt call and you raised an inquiring eyebrow. As if he was offended, the teacher whined, “You didn’t even bother shooting me! You answered to the roll call, but you didn’t even use your gun! Are you not motivated enough to kill me?”

        Your irises observed this alien-like creature you’ve recently formed a student and teacher relationship with and you smiled apologetically, quite aware of how he was pouting. With a small wave of your gun you said, “Sensei, I don’t particularly want to try to harm you. You didn’t do anything to anger me so I got no reason to.”

        Your classmates heaved a semi-amused and semi-knowing breath while they sat back in their seats. You’ve been through this conversation with your teacher time and time again, so they’re not at all miffed about your answer. But the octopus still appeared to be thoroughly bothered as he continued to pout and squish his tentacles together, similar to how a shy girl would with her fingers.

        “Not even the reward is going to persuade you?” Nagisa asked with his reserved nature, although, he himself knew the answer to that already, having heard it before. 

        “Nope,” You replied back to your best friend for years while popping the p. Not even the thought of ten billion yen being yours persuaded you to attack. Even though your teacher was one weird guy, you just didn’t have it in you to attack someone who did nothing wrong to you. Yes he did blow up the moon, and yes he was threatening Earth, but above all that he has done nothing but treat you as a student. So you will treat him as a teacher with respect and courtesy. Making use of the gun in your hands doesn’t come to you as courteous, so you refrain from it.

        The yellow teacher huffed in mild disbelief at your response before waving a tentacle to your direction. “One day, you will succumb to the reward and help your classmates in killing me.” You merely nodded to appease his apparently hurt pride before taking a seat, your desk at the back beside an empty one, as you set the gun to its rightful spot on the side.

        You then smiled pleasantly at particularly nothing while waiting for the math lecture to start. If you haven't guessed it already, you didn’t want to join this assassination job. You were here for one reason only, and that’s to shelter the people you care about. Nothing else matters, not even the fact you were in the End Class, the lowest ranking class in your school. Or that the government had put a bunch of teens to assassinate this top secret being.

        None of them mattered to you. You just wanted to protect.

        “(Y/N)-chan, you want to have lunch with us?” Shooting straight up, your once dazed eyes perked up and you amiably shot out of your seat. With the brightest smile you can ever make, you nodded happily to Kayano's question before grabbing your own lunch. 

        “Of course!” You cheered momentarily before zipping straight for your green-haired friend who only smiled as she spread out her own meal. The octopus teacher had already bid farewell as he quickly used his speed to get some mapo tofu. So the rest of your fellow classmates were spread around in their own groups, talking. You were previously just staring off into space, lost at a random thought before the prospect of food had you jumping in joy. It was no surprise to Kayano that you were so ecstatic for this. Food was something you put at the top of your priorities, second of course to protecting others.

        “Wow, I didn’t know (Y/N) loved food a lot.” Hiroto Maehara commented, eyeing the group of girls you were in as you all huddled on one side laughing and chatting pleasantly. Tomohito Sugino hummed in agreement as he munched on some bread. The two were classmates you recently got acquainted with so they barely knew you, but you already counted them as people you care about. Nagisa was close with them, so you took it upon yourself to become their friends, which you didn’t regret. Maehara and Sugino were both super kind to you.

        “I didn’t really peg her to eat so much. Just look at her,” Sugino remarked from a seat as you wolfed down a sandwich. “Where does she put all that food?” He laughed, the question rhetorically said as Maehara, who leaned on a desk, smiled along.

        “Don’t you know? She puts them in her breasts!” Okajima, who was once busy off to the side watching said group of girls, popped in between the two of them with a rather perverted smile. He just couldn’t help himself if there was a mentioning of girls. Both Maehara and Sugino knew that characteristic of his, but they still paused in their chewing to give him a pointed look. Unlike the class pervert, they weren’t … well, a pervert. “What? The two of you were thinking it.” He noted and was only greeted by a shake of their heads.

        “Only you,” The two chimed and Okajima huffed in defense. “Well, it doesn’t matter where she puts it, (Y/N)’s really pretty no matter what.” Maehara said through a mouthful of food and Okajima’s eyes lit up, already excited and prepared to list all your great physical qualities.

        But Sugino said something before the other could surprisingly open his mouth, “Do you really think so?” His expression scrunched to a pondering one as he tilted his head to the side, gazing at you with wondering eyes. You had qualities that were very attractive to the male, but Sugino couldn't find the bravery to agree.

        Maehara seemed to have an abundance of that courage as he went on with, “Yeah, she’s seriously cute. Plus she’s super smart.”  He bit into his lunch. “I wouldn’t mind dating her if she wasn’t my friend.” Sugino coughed at the sudden statement and Okajima nodded, completely agreeing with the playboy. “What?” Maehara questioned when Sugino shot him a befuddled look, quite taken aback at the honesty.

        “Nothing,” Sugino then munched on his bread a little more before he blinked, suddenly reminded of a thought. “Do you guys know why (Y/N) is here in the first place? If she’s super smart, how’d she land herself here?” A silent and thoughtful atmosphere enveloped the three as they thought about the question. Why are you in E-class, the lowest out of the whole school?

        At such a perfect moment, Nagisa came strolling by and immediately the three of them flagged him down. Surprised, the bluenette flashed them an inquiring look while his upper arm was gripped. “Sorry for that,” Okajima apologized, and he darted his eyes to you for a quick look before saying, "We want to know, Nagisa. How come (Y/N) is here in E-class?"

           "We figured you'll know the answer since you and (Y/N) are close. Childhood friends, right?" Maehara explained further, and Nagisa confirmed the relationship between you and him with a nod. The brunet then gestured for him to spill the beans. "So what's the deal with her being here?"

        "If it's not too much to ask," Sugino added politely.  

        At that, Nagisa peeked a glance over his shoulder to you. He's sincerely surprised that they weren't knowledgeable of why you were transferred to this class. Everyone in A though D classes were still talking about it this morning even though the event transpired months ago. Thinking back to the moment where things changed for you, Nagisa sighed before mumbling out, “(Y/N)-chan’s here because she defended Kayano and I from rude students before the principal intervened. She said that we’ll remain friends even if others had shunned us. In the end she got demoted after being falsely accused of attacking another student…”

        Okajima and Sugino gaped in disbelief while a low whistle sounded from Maehara. They couldn’t quite believe that you, who smiled at practically anything, could be capable of doing something that was considered taboo in their school. It came to the three as quite a shocker.

        “Maehara, here’s your drink.” Yuma Isogai saddled up to the growing group with his ever kind smile. But it faltered a bit when he glanced at everyone’s awestruck faces. Turning to the only one who wasn’t shocked, he asked Nagisa, “What happened?” Nagisa relayed the information to him and the male only nodded, already aware of what you done. However, he did say, “That was pretty cruel. She technically didn’t do anything wrong yet she was put down here. It must’ve been heartbreaking for her since she was a top student...”

        Nagisa nodded absentmindedly, although a bit glumly. “Actually (Y/N)-chan was fine with it. She didn’t care so long as she was with me and Kayano…” Nagisa wouldn’t say it out loud, but he was actually guilty that you sacrificed yourself to defend them. If he had just left school fast enough, then you wouldn’t be down in E-class with him. Even if you yourself had told him that it wasn’t a problem to you, the male still felt that responsibility.

        At his words, four pairs of irises latched on you again. You were just peacefully laughing about a story Hinano, the bubbly orange-haired girl, had in regards to bug catching. You were smiling, and exuding such a delighted aura that it was hard for the four to connect that side to a more serious one, one who wouldn’t hesitate to fight anyone who dares insult those you loved. 

        “Aw, shoot.” You hissed as the carton of strawberry milk you were chugging down opened up at the bottom. A splash of pink coated the lower parts of your shirt and you hastily stood up out of instinct. Grimacing, you narrowed eyes at the carton before crumpling it in your hands. “Well there goes a good drink.”

        Kayano and the other girls hopped to their feet in alarm before handing you a bunch of tissues, in which you politely declined, although you were grateful for their kindness. “Are you sure?” Rio questioned as she eyed the stain clearly there. You smiled softly at her and the others.

        “I'm good. I got something I can change into, but thanks for the help anyways. Let me just clean this up” At your words, you shuffled to mop up the milk while your friends assisted you in your clean up. After the deed was done, you grabbed your school bag and then promptly exited the classroom with a small wave. The girls waved back before resuming lunch again, talking to pass the time until you come back.

        The five males still grouped together watched the exchange. Nagisa was staring worriedly at the door as if debating on whether or not to follow you and offer any assistance. The others amusingly smiled, finding you to be quite a nice character. Okajima... grinned without shame as he lecherously said, "(Y/N)-chan's changing... Maybe I should go and-."

        "Not a chance." The immediate response that came from Nagisa, Maehara, Sugino, and Isogai prompted a small laughter as Okajima frowned, his fantasies ruined. "Well anyways, did you guys know that there's a sale going on at-?"

        “Oi, Nagisa.” The trio of misfits, Muramatsu, Yoshida, and Terasaka, approached the group with mischievous smirks, effectively cutting off Isogai. The one who spoke, Terasaka, jabbed a thumb behind him as his smirk turned into something more sinister. “Come with us. It’s time to put our assassination plan into action.” The actions and words of Terasaka caused an unsettling feeling to take over the friendly group and they worriedly glanced towards Nagisa. 

        Said male pursed his lips before ultimately sighing. "I'll be back." He assured before leaving the classroom with the trio. 

        “That’s better.” You breathed out while lifting the bottom of your pristine and totally fresh shirt. The soiled one was tucked away in your bag after you so carefully dabbed at the stain with a handful of tissues. It really was good thing that you carried around an extra shirt. You never really did before this year, but then again you never had to climb and descend a mountain during the school day. In addition, you never had to avoid the higher class' attempts to ridicule you. Luckily, you were more than capable in handling a hike and a couple of troublemakers. 

        Smiling at your clean state, you shouldered your bag, glanced at the mirror to fix the collar of your shirt, before skipping out to the hallway. You’ve been gone for long time and that surely meant lunch was over, but you didn’t particularly mind since you finished your food anyway. Oh but then again, that also meant that fifth period had started.

        You wiped the smile off your face as your skip turned into a rather brisk walk at the sudden notion. You were late for class. Hurrying to the end of the hallway, you didn’t waste any time as you flung the door wide open, an apology ready to be said. “Sorry I was late, I got-.”

        A flash cut you off short and your eyes widened at the dust sifting through the air. You wondered vaguely if someone had set off a bomb, but you quickly processed the fact that Nagisa conducted an assassination attempt. A seemingly failed one however, for the yellow octopoid, your teacher, had grasped his wrist before Nagisa managed to actually nail the Anti-Teacher blade on him. It caught you by a huge surprise to see Nagisa, someone who was very quiet, initiate an assassination attempt by himself, and you couldn't help but feel on edge at the uncharacteristic way he was behaving.

        “Didn’t I tell you to be more inventive?” The teacher chastised, yet you heard him in the distance as your heart suddenly pounded against your rib cage. It was out of the blue but something was deeply nagging at you, tugging at your mind, and telling you to do something. But what?

        You saw quite clearly how the teacher pulled out a handkerchief, and while you watched his movements, the world slowed down around you. You then realized that the tug in your mind was a warning that there’s danger. It grew heavy with every passing second and your heartbeat thudded in your ears. You can hear your blood rushing as adrenaline quickly flowed through every vein and before you could even process what you’ve done, you had discarded your bag haphazardly to the side. You knew deep down that your best friend was in danger. “NAGISA,” You shouted impulsively when you saw the teacher slowly place the handkerchief on the Anti-Teacher blade.

        Your legs had reacted automatically at the sight, and you were shortening the distance between you, your best friend, and your teacher. Time still seemed to go on forever as you wedged between them and grabbed on to Nagisa tightly. You can just quickly catch his stunned expression before your eyes zeroed in at the grenade that dangled from his neck.

        This, your brain warned you, was a threat to Nagisa. Your irises constricted at the dangerous weapon and you quickly moved. Latching on to the necklace that held the grenade, you hastily gave it a pull and detached it from your friend. You then pushed Nagisa out of harm’s way, and grasped the bomb tightly to your stomach, hoping to shield it from everyone.

        You expected your teacher to do something about the situation, but from the looks of it he was definitely caught off guard by Nagisa's grenade trick. And you knew that because you can see the underlying nervousness. He was surprised. Surprised by what Nagisa did, and what you're doing now. Well, that's okay, because you got this... hopefully. Flashing your teacher a reassuring smile, you quickly whispered something to him.

        Then everything sped up at once. A burst of light accompanied with a loud explosion was witnessed at the front of the classroom. Pink Anti-Teacher pellets spilled on the floor after zipping in every direction and the students cried out, startle, while something charred fell in a deadly heap before them. It was silent for a while as the class took in what just occurred before them. 

        “We did it! Ten billion yen! Cha-ching!” The three misfits cheered all of a sudden as they danced their way to the front, seemingly uncaring of what just happened. In fact, Terasaka had even shouted out, “Serves you right!”

        Isogai whirled on them quickly and had shouted out the delinquent’s name in anger as Maehara growled out, “What have you done!” The three only grinned in an easy-going manner as they approached the burned mass.

        “Hey, what did you give Nagisa-?!”

        "(Y/N)…chan?” Kayano was immediately cut off as the boy in question stuttered with fear evident in his voice. “(Y/N)-chan…” Everyone gazed with held breaths at Nagisa, who was halfway down the row of desks, as he gradually, as if he couldn’t believe it, made his way to the front. Realization seemed to seep in like a chill as he continued to blankly walk. Slowly, everyone shifted their own expressions of horror to where you once stood.

        “Wait, (Y/N)-chan was…” Kayano’s sentence didn’t end as her voice failed her. A look of complete dismay was on her face and she quickly darted accusatory eyes on the misfits. “You…” She had started but her throat tightened and she couldn’t hold back a choked sob.

        “What? But she couldn’t have… She wasn’t even in the room when…” Terasaka stumbled over his words as nary a single dash of guilt was on his face. Only confusion was present as he pondered at the change in suicide bombers. “Well it doesn’t matter, we got the money now!” Then he bent down to peer at the blackened figure when his eyes caught something else. “Hold on…” His eyes dilated at the sudden sight of you wrapped in some kind of weird membrane and he stumbled backward out of shock.

        Nagisa collapsed on his knees the moment he caught sight of you, and he released a shaky breath. You weren’t even hurt, not a single burn was on your skin and it made the young bluenette slump back in relief. Thank goodness you were alright, was the only thing that Nagisa could think of.

        “The membrane is attached to the corpse…but…” Terasaka mumbled out and he was definitely so confused. How did you remain unscathed?

        “As it happens,” The voice of your teacher filled the room and the students glanced around with bewildered expressions, “I shed my skin about once a month. I protected (Y/N)-chan, who just so happened to intervene, by covering her with my old skin.” Upon his words, you gingerly sat up, now conscious, and the skin around you broke apart. Flippantly, you looked around with a bemused expression before you got your bearings. Immediately, you scrambled over to Nagisa to see if he was alright, ignoring or rather putting aside everything else. Even the tensed atmosphere and the sudden burst of wind did nothing to stop you from fussing over your friend.

        “Nagisa, are you alright? Did you get hurt? The bomb, did it hurt anyone else?” Your eyes skimmed over his physique and found with great relief that there was not even a single scratch on his uniform. Sighing similarly like the bluenette, you slouched and pulled on a grateful smile. “Thank goodness.” You have never been so happy. You honestly didn’t know if you would make it in time.

        A pair of blue orbs met yours and you leaned back a smidge to see the owner, although you already know who it belongs to since you’ve been seeing that color since you were a kid. Nagisa peered at you with a mix of worry, disbelief, and joy as he said, “There you go again, worrying about everyone else. (Y/N)-chan you took the brunt of the force, you should be worrying about yourself."

        Laughing lightly you replied with, “You have no right to say that, Mr. I’ll-blow-myself-up. Besides, I’m not even hurt.” Smiling small at that, you glanced back at the crumbling membrane and then to the teacher that was pure black and currently seething. You pursed your lips as you connected two and two. “At least if I didn’t make it in time, he would’ve done something for you.” You silently whispered as your attention was drawn to the quivering trio and to the octopus that seemed to have a limitless ability to scaring everybody.

        “What’s wrong with using an annoying method to kill an annoying guy?!” Terasaka pointed out and suddenly the death like mood that settled over the classroom changed to a suspiciously normal one, as the black drained from the teacher’s face and a scarlet replaced it.

        “Annoying? Hardly. Your idea itself was a very good one. Especially you, Nagisa-kun,” The octopus praised as he placed a comforting tentacle on said bluenette’s head and began to rub his hair affectionately. “The way you carried yourself so naturally on your approach, gets full marks from me. You did an excellent job at getting past my defenses. However!” He abruptly faced the trio who started at the attention. “None of you looked out for Nagisa-kun, not even Nagisa-kun himself. And yet, we have (Y/N)-chan do so for everybody here.”

        Upon his words, eyes are planted on you and you unconsciously began to raise a brow in a what-are-you-looking-at manner, until you stopped yourself. Instead of that, a small yet dazzling smile settled on your lips. You heard him say it; you were able to protect everybody. This had induced your lips to quirk upwards as you succeeded in shielding not just Nagisa, but everybody from danger.

        “Oi,” You called out, hands casually intertwined behind your head as your gaze drilled in the back of three familiar students. Upon your call, those three glanced over their shoulders and minutely tensed under the intensity of your stare. It was obvious that you wanted to break something, or even more drastic, kill someone. “If I remember correctly, all three of you were responsible for that bomb trick during fifth period.” You said lowly as your position unraveled until you were standing with a hand clenched beside you. “You know, I really hated what you did.”

        “What do you want, (Y/N)?” Terasaka grumbled out in an attempt to intimidate you but it clearly didn’t work as you stood your ground. In fact, it made you ten times more menacing as you cast your eyes to their growing guarded faces. You couldn’t believe that they were acting dumb about this.

        “If you’re going to chew us out, don’t bother! That alien already yelled at us, remember!” Muramatsu had shouted but you weren’t looking for another lecture. Abruptly, you closed the space between your victims and delivered a clean punch to the jaw of the blond. His body twisted from the impact and he’s sent flying down the dirt path. Terasaka and Yoshida’s own jaws clenched at how their friend was so easily thrown off his feet.

        Whirling on you, Yoshida tightened his fist and then yelled, “Hey, you can’t ju-!” You quickly cut him off with a roundhouse kick to the side. The male tumbled over a few feet away and, while he’s clutching his side painfully, he coughed out violently from the force. Anyone can tell that his whole torso was in pain.

        Terasaka whipped to you, who only glared and shook from all the fury bottled up inside. He couldn’t believe what he just saw, but then again he knew what you were capable of. He had known exactly what you did last year, and he knew what’s going to happen to him next. Swallowing down his thoughts, Terasaka took a step back in an attempt to run, but your hand lashed out and grabbed his collar. Effortlessly, you lifted your arm and glowered dangerously at him.

        “You’re most likely the mastermind of that dumbass plan, right? Well listen to me carefully. You may have been given the scare of your lifetime today, but you’ve signed for your death the moment you decided that Nagisa would carry out your deed. He’s a precious friend to me and you are so lucky that he was unharmed. Otherwise, I would’ve snapped your neck in a second. Then again, what’s to stop me if I do it now?” Your gaze was murderous.

        Terasaka felt a cold creep up his spine, causing his body to pale considerably. You were pulling so tightly to his collar that his shirt was starting to choke him, and he thrashed around fiercely to escape but it was pointless. You weren't planning on letting him go anytime soon. The chill that he felt was then labeled with fear and his struggles became even wilder.

        A dark chuckle reached his ears as he squirmed, and the male paused to watch you with a dumbfounded expression. You were laughing, amused, at his actions. He only saw that sight of you before his face met the ground painfully and swiftly. A warm trickle could be felt on his upper lip and the male knew his nose was broken.

        “Nagisa begged me not to injure any of you before class ended. Be glad that he was at least thinking of you or else I would've hurt you more.” Then you gave him one last kick to the side before swiveling on your shoes, ready to walk down the mountain. Your hands were still shaking while you followed the dirt path, and your eyes have yet to revert to your calm ones. You were too hopped up on adrenaline. When you had said that your only reason for being here was to protect, you weren’t being half-hearted about it. You were serious and willing to kill to protect.

Fact about (Y/N):

1. She’ll stop at nothing for those she loves.

[johnkaliskiarchitects]

Image above of a JKA "Affordable Housing Density Bonus" project that the office has subjected to the proposed "Transit Oriented Communities Guidelines".

(August 13, 2017) When Measure JJJ passed last November 8, 2016 with 64% of the vote, most developers and designers of infill housing were probably assuming that the main outcome of this measure would be to require prevailing wage jobs and some affordable housing units on projects that utilized zone changes, other discretionary planning actions, and/or General Plan Amendments. For those who pay for development, probably most do not think increasing project costs through ballot measures is wise policy. But, many more believed that living wage and fair wage jobs are a matter of equity and fairness in a place like Los Angeles where it is expensive to own or rent a home.

A lot of voters also cast their ballots in favor of Measure JJJ, offended by the seemingly "I got mine, you ain't got no right to your's", or "Not In My Backyard", or "NIMBY" rhetoric of the competing Measure S. This measure, which appeared on the March 7, 2017 ballot, at which time it was defeated by an over two to one margin, proposed a development moratorium on discretionary projects such as those noted in Measure JJJ, to supposedly allow time for new Community Plans to be written. Anyone who knows the reality of adopting community plans knows they take a lot longer then the two years allowed under a moratorium. Measure S was a not very well-veiled attempt to stop the current Los Angeles building boom in its tracks and the voters saw through it.

What was probably not noticed, and not much discussed during the lead up to the Fall 2016 election was the fifth provision of Measure JJJ, mainly that, "the City create an affordable housing incentive program for developments located near major transit stops." An interesting aspect related to the passage of Measure JJJ, and in particular this fifth item, is that when a ballot initiative is passed and includes directives to create a program, such a program or policy may be adopted without environmental review, without legislative adoption, and by ministerial action. In essence the will of the people deemed that a transit oriented incentive program producing affordable housing be implemented and on May 25, 2017, City Planning presented their "Proposed Transit Oriented Communities Affordable Housing Incentive Program Guidelines (TOC Guidelines)" to the Planning Commission, got comments and directions, and now are incorporating the Commission's comments.

The Planning Department is expected to release the final and approved guidelines any day or week. When these guidelines are released, a major new affordable housing and density incentive program, not subject to any of the wage considerations that are otherwise required by Measure JJJ, will be on the books. While the final guidelines are subject to change, a quick review of the proposed incentives is instructive.

First, the TOC Guidelines are structured not unlike the the existing Affordable Housing Density Bonus (AHDB) provisions of the zoning code. These latter bonus provisions generally provide for additional market-rate housing if a percentage of affordable housing is provided. While there are sliding scales of density in the AHDB, and even provisions which allow a developer to name their density increase, i.e. the more affordable housing you provide the more market rate housing you may develop, generally the AHDB program caps out at a 35% density bonus over the allowed density, if 11% of the allowed density is provided as very low income housing.

Whereas the AHDB applies throughout the City, the TOC is limited to areas surrounding transit stops. Transit stops in this case are broadly defined. Both two intersecting bus lines as well as a rail station are noted by the TOC as transit stops. However, the guidelines recognize through definition of "tiers" that not all stops are created equal, and allows much larger incentives at rail stops then it does at bus stops. In fact four tiers are proposed.

Tier 1 is defined as the half-mile zone surrounding a major bus stop where two lines intersect. Singular Rapid bus stops, i.e. with no intersecting bus line, can also be utilized to achieve Tier 1 status for a project as long as the project is within 1,500' to 2,640' of the Rapid stop. Tier 2 incentives are achieved if the proposed project is within 750' of two bus lines, or 750' to 1,500' of a Rapid Bus stop or Metrolink rail station. Tier 3 is applied to projects greater than 750' to 1,500' of the intersection of two Rapid Bus lines or within 1/2 mile of a Metro rail station. The highest incentives are reserved for Tier 4 projects within 750' of a Metro rail station or a Rapid Bus stop. While it is rumored that the tier definitions are still subject to adjustment to make them clearer, the principal is clear; the closer a project is to a more intense form of mass transit, the greater the density bonus potentially granted. Just how big are these bonuses?

Unlike the AHDB which typically is capped at 35%, the TOC grants a range of bonus densities, dependent upon the tier definitions noted above, that range from 50% to 80%. The TOC, also as part of its "base" incentives, grants Floor Area Ratio or FAR increases from 35% to 50%. And reflecting the normative belief that density and transit investment in the vicinity of stops should go hand in hand, the TOC further requires minimum FARs. For example, the Tier 4 incentive language states, "percentage increase of up to 50%, or an FAR increase resulting in at least a 4.2 FAR in commercial zones, whichever is greater." Presumably the drafters of the ordinance are seeking to either maximize the number of units, or force developers to build density in the form of larger, perhaps family units.

Other base incentives include minimum parking requirements, generally following the State-mandated and locally enforced AB744 minimums of .5 vehicles per bedroom, a ratio that is approximately half of what is otherwise required for residential projects by the City of Los Angeles. At the Planning Commission meeting there was even talk of further getting rid of all parking requirements within Tier 4 developments. This again follows normative planning practices that assumes that in an age of car sharing, Uber/Lyft, big city traffic congestion, pedestrian-oriented communities, and proximity to mass transit, that forcing developers to build out old-style parking quotas only raises the cost of housing for residents that will increasingly choose not to own a personal vehicle.

Like the AHDB provisions, other incentives are provided for yard and setback reductions, open space, averaging of floor area ratios, and height. In Tier 3 and 4, height incentives are increased over and above their AHDB limits of one story and 11' to two stories and 22'. Additional height incentives are supposedly being considered for projects directly next to transit based upon comments expressed at the Planning Commission.

In exchange for the relaxation of density, yard, height, parking and other form constraints, developers are expected to provide on-site affordable housing units where the number of restricted units is based upon the underlying zoning allowance limits. For the TOC, the restricted units are an expression of the total number of units provided. This would in most cases add more affordable units on these types of projects near transit stops. For example, a normative TOC Tier 4 project with a 50% density bonus would provide 11% restricted extremely low income units for the project as a whole. Under the AHDB section of the zoning code, the same project would get a 35% density bonus and provide 11% very low income units calculated from the base density before the bonus is applied.

The TOC is an experiment in incentive zoning and it is unclear at this time if the bonuses will be the "solution" that voters anticipated when they passed Measure JJJ. Each developer will no doubt test these incentives and compare them to "by-right" zoning outcomes, as well as outcomes based upon the AHDB.

Our office presently has four AHDB projects at some stage of design ranging in size from 13 units to 115 units. We subjected each of them to the TOC and considered the impact. Our findings were as follows:

o The TOC provides additional density and additional affordable housing production. o The additional density tends to force projects into more expensive construction types, mainly Type III versus Type V construction, and more Type I construction. o The additional density forces more of the required open space onto roofs and upper levels. o The parking provisions reduce the amount of parking that otherwise would be required. o The transitional height requirements, when adjacent to single-family residences, are more relaxed than the existing zoning code requirements.

Of the four projects we tested, one of them is so close to being permitted that it is not worth changing the project and adding the additional units. Another one would be forced into Type I construction and become infeasible. A third project was a Tier 1 project and the incremental difference between the TOC and the AHDB was minimal to non-relevant (I think that is what the City is hoping will be the case). Our fourth project, in the schematic design phase of work, was immediately put on hold to await the final issuance and publication as the incentive to change project direction was significant to the developer. While we are disappointed that this work is on hold, we are hopful that Planning will quickly release the guidance so we can get back to work!

We also realized in trying to implement the TOC that the provisions do need to be sharpened and made super clear. There is still too much with regard to the tier definitions that is unclear.

The bottom line is that the TOC will increase the size and scope of projects next to transit stations and encourage additional density in the larger vicinity of bus stops and rail transit stops. Developers will also need to closely compare the benefits of using the TOC vs. the AHDB. The TOC will make an impact and in this case it is an impact approved by the voters.

Finally, in thinking about this measure and subjecting our projects to its provisions we realized that the TOC is not the solution to Los Angeles's housing crisis, particularly its affordable housing crisis. The TOC is only one tool. The TOC is based upon the belief that zoning and market mechanisms can produce enough units to increase supply and lower rents. To some extent this is true, but perhaps not as much a people would like to believe, particulalrly in an expanding market where growth and demand for housing in desirable places outpaces the supply chain of housing production. Other measures are needed. From an equity standpoint the amount of affordable and workforce housing located next to transit probably needs to be increased both in terms of policy goals and implementation mechanisms.

Still, the adoption of the TOC through Measure JJJ is significant and timely even though during its adoption there was no substantive economic or feasibility analysis, no projection of how many units, much less affordable units would be produced, no form studies to understand the physical and environmental impacts, and no public exploration of the full tool chest of mechanisms available to increase housing supply and affordable housing production. In essence we voted blind. Ballot measure planning is a blunt instrument and Los Angeles now has a blunt force tool to increase density next to transit stops. While the idea to link transit infrastructure with density is correct, the means deserve a lot more study to ensure the efficacy of the outcome.

[bodies-without-organs]

Notes on Capitalist Realism, Solidarity, and Discursive Shapeshifting

Capitalist realism is the idea that the conceptual resources required to imagine alternatives to capitalism no longer exist. Throughout the memorial lecture last week, Jodi Dean linked this idea of Mark Fisher’s to the contention that the left has lost a common vocabulary which once made such imagining possible—the vocabulary of solidarity and comradeship.

To me there seemed to be a tension running throughout Dean’s talk, one that was probed by some of the questions from audience members. More than one challenged Dean’s repeated and polemical use of the words ‘communism’ and ‘comrade’, pointing to their Stalinist associations and tendency to act as a major turn-off to anyone without prior investment in this kind of talk. Dean’s response to this felt inadequate: she dodged the problem of effective rhetoric by making a nitpicking point about the historical inaccuracy of linking these terms with Stalin.

She felt that these words belonged to the common vocabulary the left has lost. If her point was that our present inability to imagine alternatives to capitalism is linked to a loss in solidarity, then I tend to agree. Elsewhere the point was made that solidarity functions in a group by increasing its affects and capacities. It’s difficult to imagine now the kind of collective will required to establish something like the Paris Commune, or the collectivisation of agriculture in Catalonia and Aragon during the Spanish Civil War, moments when genuine alternatives to the status quo were not only imagined, but briefly enacted. Nowadays moments of potential action in the face of injustice seem perpetually haunted by prisoner’s dilemmas, deficits of trust that others will take action in kind, even in scenarios where the power of group action would clearly be decisive.

However, what was missing was any recognition in Dean’s polemic that specialist vocabularies also function as mechanisms of exclusion, and often serve to reinforce destructive in-group out-group dynamics. This, it seemed to me, was the question she was dodging. She even demonstrated the dodged objection in her response to the very first question—someone said that when they post about communism on Facebook the comments often contain the suggestion that communist sympathies are somehow pathological. She dismissed these comments as something only capitalists or liberals would say. It’s hard to see how she did anything but contradict herself here. Isn’t the whole idea of capitalist realism that you do not have to be pro-capitalist to be anti-communist? If there’s any possibility of recovering the lost futures no longer imaginable, will it not begin by building solidarity between those who have suffered this loss? Won’t this necessarily contain those who now regard communism as pathological, because this is precisely the nature of the condition to be overcome?

What was strange was that Dean seemed to recognise this point in relation to vocabularies she herself had less of a taste for. There was subtext underlying the talk, a lament that class consciousness had been replaced by identity as the primary vector of left politics (Dean’s phrase), and with it the language of comradeship by that of intersectionality. Dean didn’t offer any specific criticism of this shift, but rejected the suggestion (again posed by an audience question) that it came as a response to the failure of minority groups by early leftist movements. Her contention that a common vocabulary has been lost despite this shift implicitly amounts to a further contention: that the new vocabulary of identity and intersectionality is dysfunctional as a vehicle for building the solidarity required to imagine alternative futures.

Which is why it felt like a lament. While (and I stress) not an argument made by Dean, a point often made by left critics of discourses dominated by identity is that too often group dynamics are used as a substitute for empathy. The reaction to dissent is to place the scarlet mark on the dissenter and exclude them from the dialogue, rather than to put serious effort into engaging with their perspective. With this is lost the possibility of persuasion. It is a homogenising effect, increasing both the sharpness of the group’s boundaries and the strictness with which participation is signalled by the performance of certain socio-linguistic norms as opposed to sympathy with the group’s goals. But as Dean herself demonstrated, these kind of substitutions are no less possible among the vocabularies of class and comradeship she offers, and are by no means unique to those of identity, intersectionality, and privilege.

What all this points to, in my mind, is a certain moral ambivalence cooked into the concept of a shared vocabulary. On the one hand they serve to create and maintain solidarity among those who use them. On the other they function as a mechanism for increasing the territorialisation of a group and decreasing its capacity to access empathy for those external to it. Here perhaps it’s worth linking the concept of a vocabulary to the Wittgensteinian notion of a language game, highlighting the fact that vocabularies, like games, are normative systems. A vocabulary is not just a set of terms and signs, it is a set of rules governing how they are to be used. This highlighting makes visible the sense in which shared vocabularies can function in a similar way to identities. After all an identity—gender is a lucid example here—is fundamentally a set of norms. Given a group containing different and perhaps conflicting identities received via an unconscious and unchosen process of socialisation, a shared language game offers a way of consciously choosing a larger normative context which can subsume them, and build solidarity across them.

But this kind of solidarity ultimately has the flavour of group inclusion. In this case, participation in the group is participation in a shared discourse (where discourse is taken in the broad sense including non-linguistic signalling such as expressing approval or disapproval via body language, choice of what to leave unspoken, perhaps even clothing style, etc). This is no doubt an improvement on a participation based on inherited and often problematic sets of norms assigned to a person by the accidents of birth, but it’s not difficult to see how doing so runs the risk of creating a strong sense of exclusion in anyone who has not already signed up to the norms constituting the discourse. How can this be anything but counterproductive? If the discourse is to function as a tool for creating a better society, then those who are not already signed up to it are precisely those who are most worth convincing.

The real problem, it seems to me, is how to recover solidarity in inherently heterogeneous groups where it cannot be assumed that members adhere to the same discursive norms. Because surely this is always the situation at the level that actually matters? It will always be possible to achieve unity of political will in a group by tightening its boundaries to exclude dissenters, but this achieves little of substance. Those excluded remain inhabitants of social space, continue to possess and exercise political agency. At the widest context (perhaps any context which has not been artificially narrowed) it will never be possible to assume that everyone participating in the dialogue start from the same assumptions or operate under the same discursive norms.

The real question is how to communicate across discourses, not within them. This would enable the cultivation of a solidarity based not on the camaraderie of shared identity but on empathy across difference—difference not only of identities received, discovered, or created, but of discursive spaces inhabited. In this regard, the process by which vocabularies and discourses come to function as identities is something to be resisted. Camaraderie is, in a sense, the opposite of empathy—where sameness is assured, there is no need for the labour required to meet sincerely with otherness. The point to stress is that sameness in this sense can take the form of a shared vocabulary.

Taking inspiration from Richard Rorty, one strategy of resistance to the crystallisation of discourse into identity is the cultivation of a sense of irreverence towards particular discourses. They are, in the first instance, tools (a point whose implications Rorty works through in Solidarity, Contingency, and Irony). As such there is simply nothing to be said about the inherent value of a vocabulary; value is always relative to the task to which it is put, and comparisons are only meaningful insofar as they are made between vocabularies put to the same task. Rorty wants us to make a virtue of discursive shapeshifting, the ability to slip into new language games even when they are incommensurable with those more familiar to us. To my mind this seems like a key step in creating the conditions for the emergence of solidarity across lines of difference.

Returning to the issue of class and identity, it’s not difficult to see where the friction arises. Insofar as identity discourses focus on minority struggle, they necessarily place working class struggle in the background, since it is by nature (almost by definition) a struggle of the majority. Highlighting this point Dean quoted Fisher, “the interests of the working class are the interests of everyone, because the interests of the bourgeoisie are the interests of capital, and those are the interests of no-one.” Perhaps this helps to account for the feeling sometimes expressed by the critics of newer leftist discourse with an orientation toward identity that it lets capitalism off the hook. But similarly a discourse focused on class consciousness risks backgrounding minority struggle, perhaps accounting for the feeling that early left movements propagated the marginalisation of minorities, replacing a hegemony of rich white men by a hegemony of white working class men.

It’s no big deal to point out that both of these discourses usefully highlighted some forms of social injustice at the same time as problematically obscuring others. There seems to be no reason the benefits of both cannot be brought together and their blind spots mutually attenuated. All it would take is letting go of their function as identities in themselves and treating them as mere tools, to be used and switched between whenever context dictates.

[makingstuffup]

Here’s an argument that we see from ace tumblr on a regular basis. It’s the argument that people not knowing about your identity or believing that it’s real is, in and of itself, a form of oppression (often phrased as “at least people know you exist”). This argument is being used in someone’s blog post to prove a certain point.

[T]here is one more term which I must define, namely that which I call "oppression by omission." By this, I don't simply mean the invisibility of minorities (either "invisibility" in the larger society, or as "invisibility" within minority spaces, such as this blog post about the invisibility of Native/Indigenous people in spaces for people of color). There are countless ways in which minorities of various kinds, and those positions of relatively less social power, are not taken into account, left out of decision-making processes that have an impact on them, etc. Oppression by omission is not "you are so marginalized we do not have to consider how this will impact you," although that plays a role in it. What I am mainly talking about here is the experience of minority groups about whom the master-narrative is "this group does not and cannot exist at all," and when one of the central ways by which oppression is occurring is through society's repeated (even ubiquitous) assertion that people like this do not and cannot exist, and that people who "claim" to be this way are mentally ill, frauds, or are otherwise incapable of accurately relating their own experiences. In some cases, anyone who even accepts the experiences of these people is considered deserving of ridicule. When oppression by omission is occurring, the people impacted by it are very unlikely to "come out" about their experiences, not because there are explicit statutes on the books about people like them, but because the social ostracism, or perceived threat of such, is immense. In subtle and not subtle ways, most of us are taught at an early age that there is something different, or scary, or not OK about our experiences. This ostracism, or perceived threat of such, is almost always also invisible to those who do not see these minorities in the first place. The invisibility begets invisibility; with few to no positive role-models, few to no positive and empowering stories to identify with, and relentless negative messaging (in some cases through spec fic), invisibility can become the only "safe" world we know, and we can be hesitant to challenge it. Oppression by omission can take place on a small scale or a large one, within the larger social framework or within minority spaces, alone or in conjunction with other forms of oppression. It is different from what is usually recognized as "oppression," the more overt and visible forms. But it is not without often profound impact on the people who are thus erased. There have been efforts aimed at challenging invisibility, even challening the oppression by omission, in certain communities. The Asexuality Visibility and Education Network has been doing this work for a decade, and recently a documentary has been made about asexuality and asexual people. Yes, asexuals face considerable oppression by omission: check out the lovely videos made by swankivy, such as here, where you can watch videos she made about her "Asexuality Top Ten." ("You can't really be asexual, you must be...")

What do you think the context of this is? What point is the author trying to make? Take a guess before you read the rest.

This comes from the blog critpsitheory, which aims to combat the oppression of people with psychic powers. The entries date from 2011 to 2013.

It has a long list of bingo cards, a list of how to evaluate media for anti-psi bias, a list of common microaggressions against psi, and more. This is the post the quote came from, and the author goes on to say:

The concept of oppression by omission is also helpful for understanding the invisibility faced by more esoteric minorities, such as Otherkin, therians, psi/sang vampyres, or even what it's like to be part of a multiple system. To some degree, transgender people also face oppression by omission, such as "genderqueer people do not exist," "transmen are really butch lesbians who took it too far," or "trans women are all cross-dressers who want to colonize women's identities and bodies." Bisexual/pansexual people also face it. The list goes on. Now all of these experiences (and many more) are very different, and very diverse within each category. The only parallel I am drawing is that in each instance, the social master-narrative is, at least at times, one of "non-existence," and so each and every time someone tries to come forward with a counter-narrative and express his/her/hir experience of the world, for whatever reason, he/she/ze has to deal with that master-narrative in some way. It might be because someone else is shutting them down or putting them down. It might be because they have to couch their experience in other terms in order to get through someone's filters. It might be because they have to, in some sense, "test out" all the people they talk to about this aspect of their lives to see if they can accept it. It might be that they choose never to tell others, because they know that telling others is fundamentally emotionally, socially or even physically unsafe. (See this video, for example.) What does psi omission look like? It really takes many forms. It can be that psi experiences are omitted from the biographies of famous people, even when these people wrote extensively about their experiences -- such as Mark Twain (for example here, and the several articles linked here) or Konstantin Tsiolkovsky. It can be the dearth, or even total lack, of non-sensationlistic non-fiction produced about the subject. It can be discourse or study that focuses exclusively on whether or not the "claims" are "real," with little to no attention paid to the narratives of the people living with these experiences (except when the purpose is sensationalism, or the entertainment of non-psi people). It exists in the lack of realistic characters, with experiences like ours, present in "realistic fiction" on television, in books and movies, etc. -- characters who are full people (not two dimensional plot devices), characters whose role in the story is not to "do psi things" every week (or simply to be scary, or to stand there and look sexy), characters who exhibit self-determination, characters who can serve as positive role-models. It exists in the complete lack of serious support groups (in the US, anyway) for young people trying to understand their experiences in a world that denies, stigmatizes and ridicules them. It exists in "othering" language and the use of us as rhetorical sarcasm (which I will cover in more depth on this blog).

Now, whatever your personal beliefs on the existence of psychic powers, I hope we can all agree that people with psychic powers are not an oppressed group. The author lists bi and trans people as also suffering from this “oppression by omission,” and I hope we can all agree that bi and trans people actually are oppressed.

What does this tell us? It tells us that this argument is a bad one, and can be used to “prove” the oppression of any identity whatsoever as long as it’s less well known.

This blog came out of the heady days of roughly 2009-2012, when some sectors of the internet collectively discovered social justice in the aftermath of RaceFail. In the naive enthusiasm of those days, many people started creating privilege checklists, bingo cards, etc. for every identity they could possibly think of that faced societal stigma or invisibility or was not considered the norm. 

There was one popular social justice blogger at that time who argued that being able to not drive drunk was a privilege, not being a necrophiliac was a privilege, and not being attracted to your siblings was a privilege similar to straight privilege. This blogger also endorsed monosexual privilege and binary privilege (the word “allosexual” hadn’t been invented yet, but I believe she also endorsed “sexual privilege”). (I’m not going to name her because she no longer endorses those ideas as far as I know.)

There were bloggers, some of them trolls but not all (and plenty of earnest people reblogged and supported the trolls’ ideas), who endorsed the ideas of “transethnic” and “transabled” oppression, which meant that people who identified as a different ethnicity than they were, or who identified as having a disability that they did not have, were oppressed. 

Take a look at this list of personal privileges and oppressions, and “some of the oppressions and systems that kyriarchy is composed of.” (Warning: the author admits to committing sexual abuse.) I think this person was later revealed to be a troll, but they were satirizing a very real and common way of thinking.

The word “queerplatonic” came out of that time, and is representative of the ideas of that time.

“Privilege Denying X” was a popular meme at that time, and in response to the ace discourse - which was going on then and has never stopped - someone created the blog “Privilege Denying Asexuals,” which responds to ace tumblr’s rhetoric with many of the same arguments we are still using. (It’s an interesting exercise to see what’s changed and what hasn’t.)

In roughly 2013, tumblr slowly began changing courses to say that not all forms of societal stigma, discrimination, and lack of visibility were actually examples of a privilege/oppression dynamic. Materialist analysis slowly began gaining the upper hand, and now you’d be hard pressed to find someone on tumblr who thought that drunk drivers, necrophiliacs, “transabled” people, goths, furries, “vampyres,” people with dyed green hair, etc. are oppressed. In most cases where groups like this are concerned, it is no longer common for people to equate the forms of discrimination and invisibility described in this psi post to oppression.

Ace discourse is simply one of the last holdouts of this kind of rhetoric. 

I do not mean to say that asexuals are like drunk drivers in that they are harmful, or like “psychic vampyres” in that the experiences they describe don’t exist. Some of the groups that people claimed were oppressed then are real, some are not; some face real difficulty in society that should be respected, some do not; some are not inherently harmful to others, and some are. People who don’t experience sexual attraction are real, often do face difficulty, and their lack of sexual attraction is harmless to others, but that does not make them an oppressed group, and it certainly doesn’t make them oppressed under homophobia and transphobia, the systems of oppression that the LGBT coalition exists to fight.