#social power

[cazort]

I also have noticed that the ability of women (or anyone, for that matter) to manipulate is directly proportional to their privilege and status and social power in society. Powerful, high-status women can manipulate much more than less power and status.

A lot of the times, when someone is criticizing a woman for being "manipulative" there is a legit criticism to be made, but it's less of the woman herself and more of the systems that give her unearned power over others.

For example, a white woman in a deeply racist subculture or community might be able to get her way by wrongly accusing a black person of a crime, or even by merely threatening it. The same can go for wealthy women accusing poor people. There is also an element of free time and connections and resources in manipulation. With more time on your hands and more social connections, it becomes easier to manipulate. Both of these are a function of privilege.

The problem isn't merely the women, even in the case when the women are doing something actually bad. The deeper problem is in the systems that allow them to do it. And these same systems often afford men of otherwise similar socioeconomic status more power than women.

In some subcultures and social contexts, men can manipulate just as much as women, and they get away with it largely because of cultural privilege and sexism. Women get blamed for "manipulation" when men doing the same thing rarely or never get accused of the same. The word itself seems to have misogyny built into it. Look to the political sphere and you'll see countless examples of men manipulating each other. Putin is a master manipulator. Men vie for power in Trump's administration by trying to manipulate him, both to good and bad ends. The reason we don't call this manipulation is primarily sexism built into the word.

When I imagine an ideal society, it is one where there is a lot less manipulation, both because everyone feels empowered to take charge of their own life without resorting to manipulation, and because there are weaker or absent social hierarchies such that people aren't able to get away with manipulation because everyone is viewed with respect, and people quickly turn on anyone who is lying or scheming in ways that hurt others. And it's one where the word "manipulate" is truly genderless.

I cannot relate to people who dislike female characters for “being manipulative.” She’s literally creative problem solving before your eyes. She’s literally just using her words. Maybe the other blorbos should be less pawn-like for her beautiful hands hmm

[thesagittarianmind]

The study of power….

[jstevh]

Bleek Manifesto : Craft for a new age

Each post is crafted and I call them bleeks. Find yourself reading more than one? Understand social power I seek.

Influence you can feel on your return. Learn then how social actually works.

For freed minds escape from social media grind is so sleek.

Get idea churning out 'content' is work? Then why do so many who do that nonsense automate it?

Is not work. They don't care. Care is well evident in how you share.

Well distributed media is a new wave. Is a search for freedom like for Bluesky. I definitely did key in on that name. Is quite clever.

Global communications can serve a purpose. Before posting any message, anywhere can ask self a few basic questions:

Does this message reward attention?

Am I giving guidance on what to expect on return?

Does this effort fulfill expectations I have encouraged?

Effort rewarded in truth can seek. Is timing and grace to care with craft. Do seek.

As in times before humanity can rise. Learn to soar but who really desires to fly?

Mind at work is destiny desired by grace to be inspired. Craft well? Attention get was earned.

Learn to fly. Escape to blue skies.

[sanetimental]

Building Trust For Social Goodwill

Building trust is essential for gaining social goodwill in a new environment. This is achieved through understanding chronicity, shared identity...

When in the midst of one’s kinsmen, it is easy to underestimate the role of trust in fetching goodwill from members of our tribes and circles. We seem not to recognize the privilege of being trusted for simply just being a member of the clan or tribe because we are automatically deserving of goodwill and belongingness by simply just being born into that tribe. In a broader social context, there…

[csuitebitches]

Traits I’ve Noticed in Confident People 

Disciplined - if a target is set, it is achieved 

Speaking - Can speak multiple languages. Can express thoughts clearly even if vocabulary is limited. The listener understands their point. 

Strong extroversion socially - can approach and talk to new people with ease, but also make them feel comfortable. Good at following up, asking questions and inserting little stories about themselves without exposing too much 

Strong general knowledge / industry knowledge. They know what they’re talking about 

Hard to please but not arrogant about it. They won’t readily accept a fact or opinion, even if the majority agrees - they’ll debate with it, think over it, play the devil’s advocate

Good posture

Strong set of principles and self control. There’s no shame in wanting to say, help someone, choose not to drink socially, buy a coffee for a poor person on the street; they don’t hesitate to do good deeds 

Hygienic. Clean, groomed, well dressed, well maintained. 

Observant and proactive at the same time. Can pick up on body language relatively easily - can sense discomfort or unease in someone and do something about it. 

Have a strong sense of self identity. Can be opinionated but open to challenges. 

[tauntaunsworld]

Simply put

[hussyknee]

Freedom for Sudan! 🇸🇩

Freedom for The Congo! 🇨🇩

Freedom for Armenia! 🇦🇲

From River To The Sea, Palestine Will Be Free! 🇵🇸🇵🇸🇵🇸

[defleftist]

“Be wary of any mentality that would make cattle or vessels of women, because that same mentality will make machines and tools of you.”

- Andrew Hozier-Byrne

[thecurioustale]

I've been meaning for a few days to reply to this and add my thoughts, but as time passes I'm realizing that it's not likely to happen, so I just want to reblog this with my broad enthusiasm for the thesis laid out here as well as a "most of the way" endorsement of agreement.

I especially especially especially want to underscore this paragraph:

Third, and I think this is probably a lot more important than people give it credit for, secret societies were one of the unacknowledged pillars of male homosocial intimacy, and their gradual disappearance from the landscape over the last seventy or so years has created a much more emotionally barren and hostile world for gender-conforming men.  It’s not unusual for someone to note that men seem really starved for intimacy; articles about men relying entirely on girlfriends and wives for their emotional support and comfort are a dime a dozen.  But consider that participating in a standing conspiracy of fellow-travelers is also an opportunity to practice emotional intimacy with other men, and that these are the perfect conditions in which to share feelings and offer mutual emotional support without contravening masculine norms.  And when participating in one or more such groups is the norm, they can become a load-bearing part of the culture of gender itself; traditional masculinity in the absence of secret societies may simply be less viable, but because nobody can talk about secret societies, it’s equally challenging to diagnose the problem.

I am always searching for further insight into humanity's gender dynamics, and I found this to be a most welcome addition to my own thinking. I think we can all agree that there's clearly something that masculine-identifying males are missing in modern society, but I have tended to be wary of destruction-based fillers for that hole (e.g, "men" are more violent and are being held back by our modern "civilized" society), because in my experience most males don't actually want a violence-based lifestyle; the romanticization of violence common in so many males and practically all (nonradicalized) masculine cultural paradigms is strictly a fantasy.

Secret societies have never super caught my interest, personally, even though I led one of my own for a couple of years called The Imperial Table. Mine at least was not male-exclusive, and if I recall it had about five female members (one trans) and seven or eight male ones (including my agender, male-bodied self), which kind of casts it is an unrelated quantity to what Toggle's Bloggle was talking about in terms of the secret society as a male-bonding modality.

Separately, I also want to single this part out:

And for another, [belonging to a secret society] has a way of surrounding you with an intensely magical world.

This is an important detail too. One thing i have learned with my own life experience and philosophical work is that (most) humans intensely crave the "magical," which might be best understood as the childlike awe and wonder and mystery that comes from experiencing some things in the real world.

One last bit:

It’s the social power that fascinates me as much as anything, I think.  As with everything this powerful, it’s often quite evil; actually it’s far from obvious that secret societies in toto have been a force for good in the world.  But is there some way to cultivate that social potency in a way that’s ordered to the good?  Some lurking alternative to the brute power of statecraft and economics and social norms?  So very enticing…

This is another great take. My own study of human power structures can vouch for the fact that they are much more numerous and diverse and entwined in our lives that our prevailing cultural discourse has any recognition of. The load-bearing filaments of power are everywhere, and secret societies—and non-secret societies—have been and still are a major category type of social power.

It's fascinating, actually—endlessly fascinating to me—just how little of our lives depend on what we often consider the essentials: physical prowess, governing authority, and wealth. Most people do not possess large quantities of any of these "marquee" modes of power. And the way they do it is usually through some of these non-governmental social power structures. I find these kinds of people interesting demonstrations of human nature, and fascinating to explore as fictional characters.

Anyway, to tie off my own thoughts: As a worldbuilder, I think that capturing secret societies in the culture is an important detail to include. I'm pleased to say that I do have a little of this in my existing work, especially in The Curious Tale, but perhaps not enough.

Just Between Us

If we're being honest, I'm really fascinated by secret societies.

This is in part an artifact of my Southern-ish upbringing, maybe? Like, the cultural tradition of (mostly male) secret societies isn't discussed much except as a joke or in the past tense, but they held on much longer in some places than one might naively think, the American South included. I was kinda-sorta invited to join the Masons once (there’s no such thing as an actual invitation; you have to ask.  But if somebody tells you this fact in confidence, they’re kinda asking you), and there are some groups associated with the Boy Scouts that they ran us through as a sort of 'trainer' secret organization. If you hang out in the right places, you'll eventually notice recruitment efforts for less benign versions- typically, right-wing militia groups work this way. And there's the Klan, of course, at the most evil end of the spectrum.

People tend to mark the heyday of the American social conspiracy as being in the first half of the 20th century, but as far as I know the pattern of highly gendered secret societies goes back basically all the way as far as we can track such things.  Much older than any of the societies themselves, anyway. The pattern is surprisingly robust across different cultures, and it’s also a clear precursor to ‘modern’ stuff like the Delta Force in the US military.  Even the famous white hoods adopted by the KKK (the second KKK that is, the resurgence from after Birth of a Nation was filmed) predate that organization by several centuries, and were a common motif in European secret orders going back at least to the late medieval period.

This is probably an under-examined part of why the Red Tribe’s got the weird narrative vulnerabilities that it does; why the odd beliefs so often take the form of conspiracies and ‘inner circles’ where the true evils are unmasked and the true righteous fight takes place.  A lot of them- particularly the older set, who came of age before the web- have direct experience with the world working this way!

I’ve been ruminating on this, lately.  Less because of the societies themselves, and more because of their second-order effects, the kind of unacknowledged changes that the presence and absence of really prominent secret organizations can make in the social fabric.  Think about it- if you know, if you really actually know with confidence, that there are networks of people (in practice, men) out there scouting for potential members, and that these groups have real and undeniable power over your world, then that immediately changes your landscape.  

For one, it passively encourages you to demonstrate the virtues of prominent societies in the hopes of being invited to join them, and you’ll be very self-policing in order to achieve this, because you never know who’s watching.  If those secret societies have a reputation for honesty, fortitude, and generosity, you’ll try to be honest, and enduring, and generous.  If they’re terrorists waging a campaign of racialized violence across America, you’ll be not just emboldened but incentivized to act in more racist ways at all times, for the promise of power and belonging as much as for any deeply felt racism you may feel.

And for another, it has a way of surrounding you with an intensely magical world.  You see your fellow-members in public, and wink, and know; you see others winking, and sharing an understanding, and wonder.  By their very nature, it’s ambiguous what, exactly, a secret society is capable of, how large it is, and so on.  The episode of The Simpsons making fun of the Masons plays on this to great effect, bouncing back and forth between (on the one hand) this huge ancient and wealthy organization controlling the fate of the world, and (on the other hand) the more grounded reality that a secret society in practice is an excuse to have fun hanging out with your friends and drinking a few beers.  But when the ‘secret society density’ hits a certain threshold, the banal realities of any given organization give way to the possibility that you just haven’t found the right secret society yet, the one where all the decisions are really made and all the power is really held.  You start asking a lot more who?-type questions, instead of how?-type questions.

Third, and I think this is probably a lot more important than people give it credit for, secret societies were one of the unacknowledged pillars of male homosocial intimacy, and their gradual disappearance from the landscape over the last seventy or so years has created a much more emotionally barren and hostile world for gender-conforming men.  It’s not unusual for someone to note that men seem really starved for intimacy; articles about men relying entirely on girlfriends and wives for their emotional support and comfort are a dime a dozen.  But consider that participating in a standing conspiracy of fellow-travelers is also an opportunity to practice emotional intimacy with other men, and that these are the perfect conditions in which to share feelings and offer mutual emotional support without contravening masculine norms.  And when participating in one or more such groups is the norm, they can become a load-bearing part of the culture of gender itself; traditional masculinity in the absence of secret societies may simply be less viable, but because nobody can talk about secret societies, it’s equally challenging to diagnose the problem.

I’ve been dancing lightly around one of the more important manifestations of the secret society in the modern era, which is of course being a sex pervert; it’s not the first conspiracy you think of, but it’s one of the forms that survived the internet boom, so it’s a good example.  The Friends of Dorothy were a secret society in every way that mattered, back in the day, and many of their modern successors still are.  As with the Masons, one pretty much has to invite oneself, but they’re usually quite welcoming to new members that show an interest.  Consider the ways that these groups reward and cultivate certain virtues, even outside their perimeter; consider how they re-enchant the world; consider how they open the door to close friendships and emotional intimacy with others.

It’s the social power that fascinates me as much as anything, I think.  As with everything this powerful, it’s often quite evil; actually it’s far from obvious that secret societies in toto have been a force for good in the world.  But is there some way to cultivate that social potency in a way that’s ordered to the good?  Some lurking alternative to the brute power of statecraft and economics and social norms?  So very enticing…

[reality-detective]

This 👆 is flat out Communism bypassing Socialism. 🤔

[infinitelystrangemachinex]

massages forehead So Ambessa hid Mel away because she was a weapon in the literal sense, a mage. But Ambessa came to Piltover for Hextech? And Ambessa had nothing to say to Mel about her powers having visibly awakened? Even when Mel offered to go with Ambessa, giving her the ultimate opportunity to make Mel a weapon for real? And Ambessa made no attempt to find or retrieve Mel - not just her daughter and the remnants of the family Ambessa professes to love, but also her ultimate weapon - when she disappeared? And Ambessa trusted Singed and Viktor on their home turf - neither of them hiding how insane and self-serving they are with every reason to take over Ambessa's soldiers or just blatantly turn on her as soon as it benefits them - more than she trusted Mel? While Caitlyn (and by extension Piltover) was visibly and clearly falling away from Ambessa's teachings before Ambessa's eyes? (as if getting rid of certain people allows piltover to get rid of fascism but we won't get into All That)

Not only do I struggle to be hyped for Mel's powers beyond how amazing and beautiful she looks, but I can't help but feel like Mel is somehow less powerful in season 2 than she was in season 1, and not in an interesting way. As if Mel's ability to bend all of Piltover politics and economics to her will in season 1 now means nothing in season 2? You can argue that Jinx's attack led directly to Mel losing ground in Piltover - because I expected Mel to have to claw back that power without being able to rely on people who are too easily seduced by Ambessa and authoritarianism, and she would have to get creative to go toe to toe with her mother. I expected pushback to her mage identity that she would have to navigate. But instead this went either unwritten, or was ignored or discarded. Instead Mel is removed from the main plot, cutting her off from what made her the most interesting - only for all of Mel's very real talents, her very real powers and abilities, to be not only translated but REPLACED with magical powers she doesn't know how to control, and by the finale, those magic powers are the only powers that are considered real. Mel takes a backseat to Piltover's governing and decisions, a backseat to Jayce of all people who was not only new to politics mere months ago but made poor governing, strategic, and diplomatic decisions when he had that power. In season 1 Mel stayed off the "throne" but she did pull its strings one way or the other, and she makes no attempt at this in season 2

In my least generous suspicions, Mel was gentled and quieted to capitulate to an agenda for other characters who had to be correct and heroic - or wrong and villainous - no matter what the leadup narrative said, given her powers to help sell the game and set up future shows, and was effectively ejected from the Arcane story with faceless soldiers and a role she doesn't want because she was inconvenient there

[jstevh]

How feel validated?

Put out a tweet and was like, need to share more widely! So came here.

How do you feel validated in a world like this one? Like to know you are legit?

Is a great question to ask yourself.

I will at least suggest importance of having social power. That's needed to not just get pushed around by decisions of others.

[sanetimental]

The Concept of Peace and Power

The post examines the complex relationship between peace and power, discussing their varying roles within society and personal life. It emphasizes the need to balance peace and power for a harmonious society.

Introduction Peace and power are two concepts that are often seen as contradictory, but they can actually coexist and complement each other. They have been central to human civilization since time immemorial. They are two sides of the same coin, each influencing and shaping the other in a complex, often paradoxical, relationship. Abstract Peace and power are two fundamental concepts that have…

[alwaysbewoke]

[the-barefoot-hatter]

pediatricians are hard to find.

you aren't broken and other important things a triangle needs to hear

[syn0vial]

yes, yes, boba fett finds it strange and uncomfortable when people can see his face and this is one of the major reasons he almost never removes his helmet (in the expanded universe anyway), but another factor that i think isn't explored nearly enough is just how much his helmet shapes how he sees the world. it grants him 360° vision, lets him interface with his weapon systems and slave I, and automatically dampens loud noises and dims bright lights. imagine going through the vast majority of your life seeing the world through that lens and then suddenly taking it away. removing his helmet for any significant length of time likely isn't just uncomfortable for him but downright disorienting.