Saturday, July 23, 2011

Too Much Twat, Son

Ok, this is a point only tangentially related to Twatson, et al.  I have been introduced to some truly stellar bloggers as a result of this. There are too many to name; just check my broglol on the right hand side. Also, I'm eating Chinese right now so that's even funnier.  I have way too much information on Twatson on my computer. More Twat here Hugh Hefner has had.  But I'm not here to talk about some stupid bitch.


I'm here to talk about a smart one. Why is she bitch? Same reason the rest of us are - just born that way as a complex person full of competing interests, desires, needs and concerns.  Note this last word as it's relevant here. Concern. Not fear. Concern is a healthy disposition which allows one to take more or less accurate stock of what hazards are in one's way.  And to try as well as can be done to mitigate them.

Fear doesn't work like that. Fear is an emotion for survival. Fear is what one goes through while one is actively trying to avoid being the meal for a better predator. Like the cliff/gravity monster. It has false positives to it, which aren't great, but are better than false negatives. Getting scared when you're wrong is much better than failing to be scared when you should have been.


Well, Abbie, who blogs as ERV (endogeneous retrovirus) cracks me up.  So, I've been doing my due diligence and reading through her archives. That's when I happened upon this story.  These are the things that prevent Abbie from sleeping out of concern that her actions might actually harm someone else. And she's quite right to note that if dog owner had been female and random nice stranger had been male, she'd have handled the situation entirely differently.

I wouldn't have done it here either. Why? Because I hate women of course! Oh wait, it's called thinking through one's actions and appreciating that we all have issues we don't need to think about.  I wouldn't want people letting in others to my yard, so I don't do that to others. I don't want my phone number given out without my explicit permission, so I don't do that to others.

So, why does this matter? It doesn't really. No one was hurt and no one decided to get butthurt and start advising the world what to do. The dude in question went to find Abbie and talk to her about what she did and what he'd like her to consider in the future as it regards him. And notice the story Abbie tells.

It's a personal story in her frame of reference.  It's not advice to people for whom it would be inappropriate to tell them. She's saying:  here, x happened today, I did y and it was stupid.  I wouldn't have done this except for the fact the guy was black and a guy. And what did she do after all of that? Recognized it for what it is - presuming to have some special knowledge about what a person should or shouldn't be able to do based on their association with a group. In this case, race and gender.

And I have to say, I am just as fucking guilty. I'm still thinking right now "well, it's not as big of a deal since he is big, black and male as it would have been in other situation."  I have no way of knowing that at all. It's rank conjecture on my part, and even though I've recognize that I have no way to know what a.) random nice lady is capable of or b.) what random tall black guy is capable of I still feel it's somehow less bad an issue than the reverse.  And this is wrong of me.

Compare this with elevatorgate and see if you can't spot how the situations are different. Say, I don't think Abbie studied communications in a technical college, but somehow she manage to get across the point she wants to, and the point she needs to. All without insulting a single person. Implying that in order to understand how other people feel, one somehow has to imagine or think of one's self as a predator.

Attagirl, Abbie!

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

I have been introduced to some truly stellar bloggers as a result of this. There are too many to name

Amen. Another brilliant blogger I came across is
franc hoggle at http://greylining.wordpress.com/
I am sure you will love the rant from another cool dude that he posted today.
http://greylining.wordpress.com/2011/07/23/taa-dont-take-this-the-wrong-way/
Funnily, PZ himself provided the URL to this one.

Justicar said...

I will check him (presumably) after a while. I'm in the middle of organizing some data to have a cleaner Twat section on my system. It was getting all messy. And I'm trying to catch up on comments here and elsewhere. I am seriously in need of petitioning the Trolling Association. I'm tired of the lowrent ones they've been sending after me.

Phil Giordana said...

Shared to Facebook because this is all kind of awesome!

And at this point I don't care if I lose friends over this anymore. If they have that crazy femrad mentality, they weren't the kind of friends I should have. Having read more into Marcotte, the simple fact of knowing she is somewhat involved into all this secures me in my choice to stick behind all of you.

Justicar said...

Yeah, Marcotte is a special bag of stupid. She'll be right at home with Twatson et al.

Anonymous said...

I remember when that happened. It's the kind of mistake I could imagine myself making if I slipped the paranoia leash for an afternoon. However, being a relatively large-ish guy myself, and knowing a few women who would fucking destroy me in a fight, I'm less likely to assume that size makes a person safe in a violent confrontation, even when weapons aren't involved.

Still, it's a dramatic difference, seeing a person say "Holy shit, guys, I fucked up today... Turns out anyone can mistakes, even me. I guess that's a valuable lesson, huh?" One of the many reasons I support The Situation.

Justicar said...

Yeah. It turned out to be a non-thing, and everyone involved appears to have treated it for what it was: something to be addressed, but not made out to be anything more than it was.

We all have blindspots in our ethics, hell, in everything we do. Mostly, they're compensated for by chance which gives us the comfortable learning curve that allows a lot of these things to be cast off as "no harm, no foul, learned something".

Anonymous said...

Exactly... well, for those of us capable of learning, rather than railing against the universe.

Phil Giordana said...

Regarding nicknames, could I be "That French Dood"? Would be super awesome...

Also, I use your "let's fuck" button as the equivalent of "like". Sue me!

Anonymous said...

So have you read the one about why she couldn't hack it as an engineer?

http://scienceblogs.com/erv/2008/08/women_part_1.php