#oppressed vs oppressor

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

If you have the social influence to be able to redefine yourself as "oppressed" and enforce that definition, you're not "oppressed."

If you have everyone from government, legacy media, entertainment, industry and academia pushing your mantras, talking points, narratives and "representation," you're not "oppressed," you're the ruling overclass.

You can't be both the "oppressed" and the one doing the oppressing at the same time.

[reconstructwriter]

Rafeef Ziadah - 'We teach life, sir', London, 12.11.11

[thorough-witness-enjoyer]

Maybe it’s my experiences with my culture and having relatives who are immigrants, but the conflict between humanity and the eliksni reads more to me than just a message on xenophobia.

To me, it’s also about how groups who have experienced oppression are often pitted against each other by the circumstances created by their oppressors to keep them stuck in a cycle of violence and mistrust with one other. This cycle keeps groups who share similar pain and plights from extending mercy to each other and joining forces to fight against the systemic forces that brought them both into a hostile state, which is exactly what those forces want as it keeps those groups powerless and unstable.

[blue-thief]

that's not the point being made here and You People fucking know that

[coldjustness]

watch Southerners come swinging at Tevinter enough for a long enough period of time and watch Neve go "oh and Ferelden is SUCH a fine example of society."

[cherrybomb107]

Okay guys, I actually managed to have a civil discussion with someone on Arcane twt who disagreed with me! Everybody cheer😭😂🤭

But fr tho, I admit that I did quote twt that person in bad faith. A friend of mine made a joke about how Caitlyn wouldn’t have missed(iykyk) and this person’s response rubbed me the wrong way. Think something to the effect of “violence is never okay. Shame on you for joking about this.” So, I saw his response to my friend’s tweet and decided to ask him who he thought the “true villain” of Arcane was. I had a feeling what his answer would be.

He said Silco was the main antagonist (fair enough) but then, ofc, he started talking about how, ultimately, “both sides” were at fault for all that’s happening in the show. Now I know that one’s opinions on the media they consume aren’t necessarily a 1 to 1 with their real life politics, but for the sake of the argument, I’ll ask: what’s this obsession that we, as a collective, have with making things more complicated than they should be?

A lot of times, situations really are messy and complicated. But in this instance, I don’t think that’s the case. I don’t think the situation between Piltover and Zaun is complicated at all. I see an oppressor (Piltover) being responsible for the centuries long disenfranchisement of the oppressed (Zaun). Then here comes Jinx, who has been victimized by Piltover for her entire life, becoming radicalized against them, and being violent towards them.

The idea that “violence is bad; full stop” is very dangerous. Violence against an entire group being conflated with violence on an individual level is not good. For example, let’s talk about stealing for a second. Is a poor, starving person stealing from a store that upcharges on necessities “wrong”? In my opinion, no. Is a corporation stealing wages(which is actually the most common form of theft) “wrong”? Absolutely! Now, if you wanna be technical, both examples are “in the wrong”. However, let’s be real here: one of these things is a hell of a whole lot more “wrong” than the other.

But to bring it back to Arcane, why is this idea that “the situation is so complicated, there are no good sides” so popular? There absolutely are! Violence against an oppressor is not a bad thing! I, a marginalized individual, am not anywhere close to being “just as bad” as the mfers responsible for my oppression!!! Why do so many of us feel that way? That doesn’t even make any sense! Stop feeling bad for people who don’t give nary a fuck, nor a shit, nor a good goddamn about you AT BEST! And at worst? They will GLEEFULLY partake in destroying your community!!!

I know the show is ultimately centrist asf(and therein lies the problem) but still!

Anyways, I say all that to say, it’s fine to disagree with people, cause I was able to have a nice discussion with this person, despite vehemently disagreeing with them. But like, I really wanna know WHY these people think the way they do. How could the situation between Piltover and Zaun be thought of as anything but chickens coming home to roost? If you’ve been paying even the slightest little bit of attention to the world we’re living in, and everything that’s going on rn, how could you not apply those same principles to the show?

[titleknown]

Thought: If I were to make a Warhammer 40K movie, I'd make it a Rashomon-type semi-anthology where we see the conflict from the perspective of each faction involved in it.

Basically, leading to a core theme of the film: Everyone thinks they're the good guys in a war. Even as we see everyone in a much more fucked-up light in the other stories.

Which leads to a core theme of the setting: There are no good guys in war.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

[cto10121]

Ser o no ser, güey, esa es la pinche pregunta

[ssaltlicker]

Ti/mebomb is just arcanes version of re/ylo dont @ me

[haggishlyhagging]

The sado-ritual of excision and infibulation bestows acceptability upon gynocidal behavior— even to the extent of making it normative. This is illustrated in the precept of the president of Kenya, Jomo Kenyatta, that "no proper Gikuyu would dream of marrying a girl who has not been circumcised," since this operation "is regarded as the conditio sine qua non for the whole teaching of tribal law, religion, and morality." With these words, one chief in the Higher Order of phallocratic morality dictates its chief lesson: that women should suffer. Typically, the justification for the atrocious ritual under the reign of phallic morality involves a reversal in which the unnatural becomes normative. Only a mutilated woman is considered 100 percent feminine.* By removal of her specifically female-identified organ, which is not necessary for the male's pleasure or for reproductive servitude, she "becomes a woman." At first the reversal might seem astonishing, if one hears the term woman as representing a state of natural integrity. But if we understand this term to refer to an embodiment of the feminine, which is a construct of phallocracy, then the meaning of the expression becomes clear.**

* It is interesting to compare these attempts to feminize women with the feminization of male-to-constructed-female transsexuals. The latter, who consider themselves to be "women" (referring to "other" women as "native women") undergo operations which remove the testicles and penis and give them artificial vaginas, but no clitoris. Both of these mutilating attempts at feminization receive a large amount of legitimation by phallocracy. See Janice Raymond, The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male (Boston: Beacon Press, 1979).

** It may be helpful in this connection to recall Simone de Beauvoir's famous axiom: "One is not born, but rather becomes a woman." (The Second Sex, trans. and ed. by H. M. Parshley [New York: Vintage, 1974], p. 301). In this book of course, I use the term women to refer to females generally and reserve the term feminine to connote the male-created construct/stereotype. However, woman is often used by others to refer to the androcratically constructed (destroyed) female, who is, of course, considered "natural." There is, for example, the "total woman" of Marabel Morgan, and the "true woman" of Pope Pius XII and Pope Paul VI.

-Mary Daly, Gyn/Ecology

[hotsweetcorn]

i love people tuning into war for the first time with gaza and now assuming that all conflicts are as directly good vs evil as palestine vs israel

[spider-xan]

What is even going on with the new Spider-Man cartoon, like, I stg that every six months, something major changes and they can't decide what they want it to be, but beyond ideas simply evolving over time organically, like, first it was an MC* prequel, which made no sense based on what the movies had already established if they were going to have supervillains appear, and then it was reworked as an alternate universe or timeline set in the MC*, and first, it was going to be drawn in a Silver Age retro style inspired by Ditko's art, and now it's going to be CGI with mixed reports on if it will be 2D or 3D, and now the title suddenly changed after being in production for what feels like years now, and it's still not coming out until the end of next year.

[gingerswagfreckles]

I think people need to understand that when someone says the situation in Israel/Palestine is complicated they are not necessarily saying that the discussion of who the oppressor vs oppressed is complicated. The Israeli government has been oppressing the Palestinians for a very long time, that is clear, and it is not complicated to understand that at least since the 80s they have had dramatically more financial and military power to keep control of the territory in the way they like.

However, it is reductive and dismissive to insist that there is no complexity in the potential ways to move forward to bring peace to the region. Despite what people on tumblr.edu like to believe, "Israel should never have been created" is not a practical solution to an incredibly heated geopolitical situation in the present day. Israel was created and it does exist. 10 million people live there. 74% of the population is native born and the country has existed for 75 years. Hand waving these fact away with the opinion that "they should move back to where they came from" may make you feel good about being a Radical Leftist, but it does not give anyone a road map for how exactly millions of people without dual citizenship are supposed to just up and evaporate. Nor does it acknowledge the reality that 21% of Israelis are Arabs, the very people you are claiming to want to give the land back to.

Insisting that there's nothing complicated about expecting an entire country's population to willingly dissappear with no consequences is not a productive way to think about this conflict. It ignores the many massive superpowers that have an interest in proping up different states in the region, the power dynamics involved in any land back movements, and the inevitably negative consequences of totally dissolving an established state without a plan. It is also completely and almost comically unrealistic, so much so that it makes it hard to believe that anyone who's opinion starts and ends with this idea really gives a shit about anyone who lives in the area as much as they care about their online leftist clout.

There's nothing complicated in understanding that the Israeli government is and has been maintaining an oppressive apartheid state for decades. It is, however, very complicated to come up with a realistic way to resolve some of the most intricately entangled land disputes on the planet without plunging the region into total chaos. Not everyone has to be deeply educated on every geopolitical situation, but it is very hard to take people seriously when they know nothing about the politics or history of a region and yet insist that there is nothing complicated about it at all.

There's a lot of people on this website who are getting dangerously smug about their own ignorance, and are starting to go down Qanon type anti-intellectual paths in the name of being sufficiently radical. Not knowing the details of a very convoluted land dispute isn't something to brag about online as you call for intentionally reductive solutions. You can support the Palestinian cause and be aware of the oppression they have faced while also holding off on calling people trying to do real analysis and de-escalation work bootlickers. We need to get control of the urge to fit every global issue into a simplistic YA novel narrative structure that appeals to Western revolutionary fantasies.

[wise-falafel]

“women used to marry young and have a lot of children” VS “men used to marry women when they were still little girls and force them to be pregnant and give birth their whole life”.

“in the past women didn’t get education” VS “in the past, men stopped women from getting education and excluded them from all cultural spheres”.

“muslim women must wear hijab” VS “muslim men force muslim women wear hijab”.

“in this country, abortion is illegal” VS “men in this country made women getting abortion illegal”.

women’s oppression doesn’t happen by itself. women’s oppression isn’t passive. there is an oppressor class that actively chooses to oppress women, and the oppressor class is MEN.

[thedandelionresistance]

I think the issue is that marginalized humanity also exists, which we've written about extensively before.

It's not as simple as humans=oppressors who benefit from the subjugation of nonhumans. To summarize what we've said before, alterhuman identities involving powered or mutant humans, werecreatures who are sometimes or partially human, otherkin human identities, and human members of nonhuman systems (all including when these identities are a result of delusions/endelity) face much of the same oppression as nonhumans, for the same reason. Then, when they turn to their community, they see hatred for part of the very identity that caused them to face that hateful oppression in the first place. (Also, we did see that you use the label of CLCZ and may have different experiences - we're speaking from our own experiences and those of other people close to us, as well as some pulled from wider discussions.)

It's the same way that trans men are disproportionately hurt by posts venting about (99.9 percent of the time cis) men, and even that transhet and other queerhet people are disproportionately affected by complaints about hetero/straight people. Even within the queer community, antimasculinity has been such a large issue that people have detransitioned and delayed transitioning (or even repressed their very trans identity and not had their egg crack for longer) - all things that are well known to kill trans people. Heterosexual trans, nonbinary, aspec, and intersex people have all suffered from constant blatant hatred of straight people in the queer community - and at various points, hating straight people was also used as part of larger aphobia and transphobia, arguing that aspec and trans people were inherently dangerous invaders of "real" queer spaces and communities.

That last part is more an issue of aphobia and transphobia, but that doesn't make the use of hate towards specifically explicitly queerhets irrelevant. If anything, it's more relevant, because it was a double-edged sword of erasing aspec and trans people who aren't het while attacking those who are.

There's also the fact that these things often hurt members of the very marginalized communities they originate from. People questioning or not yet aware of their identities are pushed away from the community from shame about their perceived identity. Community members who are aware of their identity are hurt by demonization of traits they share with the identity being vented about (for example, trans women who have a deep voice or choose not to shave). And people who are two identities that are considered mutually exclusive by most people, such as multigender people who are both men and women, or people who are queer and straight as mentioned above, and so on, will always be the most vulnerable to being hurt by hostility towards someone's identity.

Neurodivergence vs neurotypicality doesn't quite map to this, but there is a point to be made that the way we conceptualize neurodivergence is very different than how people generally conceptualize queerness. A plural allistic person and autistic singlet are both considered neurodivergent, but in the context of autism alone allism is considered neurotypical, and in the context of plurality alone, being a singlet is considered neurotypical (and that's even further complicated by the existence of plural non-systems and even plural singlets, complex identity labels that can be used for any reason from having soulbonds that you don't view as sharing your body or headspace, to having pursued and achieved final fusion).

As much as I agree with a lot of OPs beliefs, I also actually agree that homophobia and gay are not accurate replacements for humanity and misanthropy.

But I also disagree that humanity is an inherently oppressive identity (not saying that you're saying that either, just that I believe that's fundamentally untrue), even within the context of it currently being an oppressive class. It's just that not all humans are a part of that class, and therefore don't all have access to the power and privilege that comes with it.

When venting about an innate inherent (and typically unchangeable trait" turns into lateral violence, hurting other marginalized people in your community or adjacent communities, it can no longer be justified as "punching up". That's why caveats can be so important, particularly on public forums and blogs (whether a blog is public or private is kind of a complicated question, but those which are publicly accessible is what I'm referring to for the sake of this discussion).

This kind of folds into the idea you talk about with not carrying this attitude towards individuals. But the thing is, community attitudes and societal forces are not separate from the people occupying those spaces and moving through those frameworks. If a response to an oppressive systemic structure, rather than dismantling or defying it, instead destabilizes and harms other people hurt and oppressed by the same system, it's directly harming individuals. It can even unintentionally reinforce the harmful systems - for example, treating manhood as inherently violent and misogynistic reinforces that that is the default standard of masculinity, and that healthy and nontoxic masculinity is the exception rather than the rule.

I think the post linked above even goes into the nuance of having spaces for safely venting, and how to mitigate harm when doing so. We've talked even more extensively privately with friends about this, and I think that absolutely there should be spaces to communicate unfiltered, messy, "negative" feelings towards oppressor classes. I also think it's important to have spaces like that be still moderated for potential toxicity and harm (for example, how some spaces for healing from misogyny fall into radic//al feminism).

I don't think venting, even imperfect and messy venting, is some great sin. I just also don't personally think it's always inherently harmless. When we've talked about this before, we've had people entirely erase the nonhuman majority part of our plurid identity, just because we talked about how it has directly harmed us due to our marginalized humanity. We were treated as having power and privilege we've never had in our entire lives, for the very same identities that directly caused us to endure significant interpersonal AND systemic harm, up to and including institutionalization, nonconsensual medication, refusal to prescribe other needed medication, whether directly or indirectly (indirectly, for example, in cases such as being suicidal due to repression of our identities).

It's also worth noting that our experiences with nonhumanity and alterhumanity both are both entirely psychological and entirely spiritual. We kind of have some double bookkeeping going on there with our own schizophrenia, but essentially it's two 100 percent gauges overlapping. Each part is inextricable from the other, and that also affects our perspective on humanity and nonhumanity not being mutually exclusively and humanity as an individual identity not inherently granting access to humanity as membership in the oppressor class.

Not all straight people are not queer, and are subject to the same isolation and difficulty finding community as any other member of the LGBTQ+ community. Just like not all cis people are not queer. The ways that a cis queer person and queerhet person might struggle for their queer identities may be different, just like even when solely referring to sexuality, a bi person and a gay man and a lesbian woman might all have different struggles.

Likewise, not all humans are, for lack of a better word or phrase, structurally empowered and unmarginalized. In the same way that heteronormativity can hurt transhet people, in part because of how heavily it leans on patriarchal gender standards (including the ones that fundamentally reject transness as valid), so too can human-normativity hurt and even oppress humans who exist outside of it. Binary gender-conforming trans people are still treated as an inherent threat to patriarchy, because it's a cisheteropatriarchy built on a foundation of queerphobia, racism, and a dozen other subjugations of marginalized people.

In the same way, the power structure which gives the majority of humans power still treats some humans as an inherent threat to itself, because it is built to enforce a very narrow inflexible definition of humanity and relies heavily on neuronormativity and sanism.

We have commonly seen it argued that it's still okay to shit on an oppressor identity to vent, precisely because it's a very small minority of humans that aren't oppressors/are potentially hurt by misanthropy.

Even setting aside that misanthropy isn't actually effective in dismantling the oppressive system itself, it's never okay to hurt a minority just because they share an identity with an oppressor class, even if the identity they share with the oppressor class is the one being attacked itself. The fact that they are a minority even within the alterhuman and nonhuman communities too only means we have more of a responsibility to make our spaces safe for them - they come to us after sharing in our oppression, and if they find hate towards the part of their identity they faced that oppression for, that just further harms and isolates them, making them more vulnerable.

This is very directly comparable to anti-masculinity, because not all venting by women about harm done by (largely cis) men is harmless. Multigender and butch trans women, trans men, and nonbinary people have all talked extensively about how this has severely hurt them, up to and including being deadly. Lumping marginalized manhood in with privileged manhood results in erasure of the struggles that marginalized men face - from black men being the primary target of police violence to trans men being denied coverage for treatment for cervical cancer until it literally kills them. It also directly isolates questioning/pre-questioning trans women, driving away some of the most vulnerable people in the marginalized class of women, who most need community support.

Idk, I think I'm starting to go in circles. But basically, this ties into a lot of larger topics, such as the idea that it's important to focus more on uplifting marginalized people than hating their oppressors on a wider scale, that expressing pain and trauma still needs to be handled with care to avoid harming other hurt and traumatized people as powerless as you, and that it's worth it to add a little extra clarification to your statements if it mitigates harm done to other people.

Not all criticisms of negative statements about identity are invalid. Sometimes negative statements about identity do very real harm to the most vulnerable members. Sometimes even, as in the case of cis women having very real structural systemic power over trans men, it is very directly literally used to perpetuate the oppression of a marginalized group. This is true within communities too - black queer men have talked about how antimasculinity not just affects them but is deadly for them, and black queer women have talked about how it also hurts them due to how people view gender as very centered around colonial white ideas, and how this leads to the over-masculinization of perception of black women.

As a nonhuman who is just as marginalized for my humanity on the basis of its relation to my nonhumanity alone, but also without my nonhumanity would still be inherently marginalized and cause me to face oppression, misanthropy is not harmless nor is the harm it can do justified or even effective in fighting our oppression. That being said, I think there are ways to create safe spaces for expressing negative feelings even towards innate traits and identities that often correspond to systemic inequity and structural oppression.

Theory aside, I think the easiest way to start is to bookend venting with two very short phrases:

"I feel like..." [insert vent] "but this is just my personal experience right now"

Because the thing is, it doesn't even require you to state that the identity isn't inherently bad (I think it's worth doing if you can, but still).

All it is, is acknowledging that you're not making an objective statement on the inherent morality or value of an entire group of people.

Heck, I have an ex-friend (ex- for very different reasons) who told us straight up that they hated men/manhood, but would not mistreat men in the server we shared. They also said that it was something they were working, but we told them from the beginning that what mattered is how they treated people. Even with manhood being a part of our genderfluidity, that was the main important thing. We only asked them to spoiler text if they needed to vent about men in the vent channels and leave a content warning, so that we and others who identified as masc or men could also give her the space to have those valid feelings and even those of us up for it at a given point could offer reassurance and help her to process everything.

At the end of the day, it's about not assuming that everyone of a specific identity is also a member of that oppressor class/nonmarginalized/not harmed by the structures most of their identity benefit from. It's also about acknowledging that just because the "exceptions" might be rare (though often less rare than people think, as in the case of trans men, because erasure is a crucial tool of oppression), that often they are part of our communities or victims of our same or similar oppression, at the bottom of the system with us. These people deserve safety and community, and it's important not to push them away or further harm them, especially since those very same structures of oppression rely on us being divided and isolated.

At the end of the day, even when working through strong difficult feelings, it's worth it to try and soften edges which may hurt not just innocent but vulnerable targets. It's worth it to hold onto a little bit of compassion, and just reframe misanthropy as more clearly processing very personal trauma and pain. And it's worth it to consider minority groups even within marginalized communities - because before punching up, it's important to make sure you know which way is up.

Sometimes I genuinely want to reblog some of these posts just swapping every instance of "human" for "gay" and "misanthropy" for "homophobia," because it really puts it into perspective.

"But of course I know there are good humans out there -" Saying something to the effect of "Gay people are horrible" and then following up with "but of course I know there are good gays out there <3" doesn't actually make you not homophobic.

"But humans have actually done bad things that destroy the planet -!" 90% of my mom's internalized homophobia stems from real gay people she knew who intentionally spread HIV to other people, and that being her only exposure to the queer community before, like, me. Do you think that makes it fair for someone to be homophobic? Because a small proportion of the gay community does terrible things? Like, no, right? So why do you think it's fair for you to act misanthropic because a small proportion of the human species does terrible things?