Incivility
Incivility
https://twitter.com/willshetterly/status/1011654530789007366
Will Shetterly further says: "Pick a cause and work for it as best you can in a way that can't be turned against it." (italics mine)
That's a good goal, but harder than it looks to accomplish.
I can, however, attest to the transformative power of the hissy fit as wielded in Southern households (several cherished pieces of Revere Ware show signs of significant Field Modification).
I can also bear witness to the necessity of clearing the AO if competing hissy fits were unleashed.
Will Shitterly can go fuck himself. Nazis, kidnappers, fascists don't deserve to eat in public in peace.
ReplyDeleteWe are not incivil when we stand up to monsters. I can think of nothing more civil than stopping and frustrating the efforts of evil and cruel abusers of power.
And Will Shetterly is an intellectual and ethical ignoramus to frame the conflict as a "both sides" thing. Even the most aggressive of leftist taking action only resort to violence in self defense.
The Nazi motherfuckers are running people over with their vehicles, making bombs to blow up Federal Buildings, killing abortion doctors and nurses, assaulting 15 years old black boys for swimming in a pool they had permission to swim in. There is no comparison.
Anyone equating lapses in manners and social etiquette with putting children in internment camps and killing black children and amplifying hate speech - is a fucking shit for brains OR a fucking agent of evil - maybe both.
My language and gruff will never be equal in monstrocity to what we are seeing from the Trump administration.
I think SHS and Miller and the rest of them are lucky they aren't spit on or shot at. They'd deserve it all.
Some monsters threaten so many lives - so effectively run the machines of hate and murder that they should be given no benefit of the doubt, no level of civility - no quarter.
I'll save my civility for human beings.
Thom Thomas And Thom Thomas can go fuck himself too.
ReplyDeleteHere's something I said that I wish Drew had also shared, which might've helped clarify my point: Civility is not niceness or etiquette. It is only the most formal form of politeness. It is loved by diplomats and hated by people who love war.
However, your response nicely illustrates the difference between diplomats and those who love war.
Will Shetterly Are you not being incivil by returning the "can go fuck himself" comment to me?
ReplyDeleteIf you can't even maintain civility with an internet blowhard, how can you expect people to maintain civility towards the monstrous things the Trump admin and his cronies have done and will be doing?
How are you going to diplomatically deal with Nazis you arrogant asshole?
You are going to accuse people defending themselves and their loved ones of loving war?
Are you someone having lived such a life of privilege and comfort that you think that being nice to monsters will deter them.
Black men and boys being gunned down in the streets and in their own yards - you going to call their rage and demoralized frustration a love of war?
You going to tell the Latinx communities terrorized by storm troopers in ICE uniforms that defending themselves is a love of war?
If so, you are morally bankrupt and self righteous you motherfucking prick.
Show me what you're made of hypocrite - be civil to me.
We need to reinstate the code duello . Of course, we wouldn't want health insurance rates and medical costs to climb, so limitations on weapons is required. Bottle rockets at fifty paces; no lighters allowed only matches. For those preferring closer combat - rotten tomatoes, oranges, or bananas at five paces. I was going to suggest potatoes, but likely an eye would be put out. . (
ReplyDeleteAnd I'm only attacking you with words. Imagine me, all 6' 3" inches in a police/military uniform manhandling you and putting you in cages even though you are an American citizen.
ReplyDeleteImagine me ripping your child from your hands. Imagine being powerless and impotent, unable to protect your child or your loved ones.
Go fuck yourself with your false ideas of civility. It is incivil to not stand up and push back against evil. It isn't just incivil - it is inhumane and immoral.
Thom Thomas Ow! I feel your pain, but I shared Will Shetterly's post because I found agreement with it.
ReplyDeleteSo if you're going to cuss folks, don't leave me out. Or maybe cuss folks that deserve it more, I dunno.
I don't know all the answers, but I'm pretty sure that Work trumps Rhetoric. I've seen Rhetoric support the Work, but also seen it destroy the Work, or stand apart from it.
I stand for Doing The Work, best as I know how. And I try to save Losing My Temper as a Last Resort. But that's just me.
And to be clear - I think civility is great and is largely needed for society to operate. But civility towards agents of evil is no civility - it is complicity.
ReplyDeleteAnd perpetuating an idiotic false equivalency between the anemic American left and the most extreme, in power and established fascist ethnostate right wing we've seen in western civilization since the 1940s is also a kind of vileness.
Protecting women trying to enter Planned Parenthood or being a water defender or protecting peaceful anti-racist demonstrators from violent white supremacist Nazis is in no way even close to what we are seeing from the right wing white America.
The fatal fly /flaw in this ointment is in thinking that the GOP's response is deterministic, or rather, that it can be determined npby and through its opposition's actions.
ReplyDeleteThe GOP will attack and turn against anything and everything, including its own positions. (The Affordable Care Axt is a chief case in point.)
Hamstringing yourself out of that concern is idiocy. This advice is helplessly naive bullshit.
and you are going to quibble and hand wring over manners?
ReplyDeleteDrew McCarthy Anger is a valid human emotion. I will not save it when it is deserved. Framing the conversation is work. That is why the GOP outspends and has always outspent the US left with its think tanks, advertising, and opinion making.
ReplyDeleteMost churches are almost nothing but community held together by rhetoric and the mindless belief it conjures.
Liberals need to wake the fuck up. Shit is dangerous right now. Mueller isn't going to save us. 2018 elections aren't going to save us.
Not all of us can sublimate their rage into genius. And now is not the time to tone police people.
High minded manner making couched as moral high ground is simply arrogance, privilege and naivety hamstringing necessary direct action.
Also - hissyfit comes off as sexist and bigoted to me. It is a word to summarize and demean a show of emotion - which is often assumed to be a show of irrationality.
And in all my life as a Southerner, I've only heard it used to describe women displaying anger and aggressive dissatisfaction, towards gay men emoting angrily and children "acting like little girls."
As I understand the usage - the word's power comes from its ability to demean feminine displays of emotional anger and carries the assumption of irrationality.
I've never heard it used towards men having a very butch and idiotic round of chest thumping and dick swinging.
So anyway - yeah - I'm taking motherfuckers to task right now.
I don't want to have to leave the US to protect my kids. If we do not stop these monsters none of us (but I guess the most docile and polite) will be safe. Any one left will only be safe if white enough and loyal enough to monsters.
Am I being impolite - yeah. Because, I'm sorry, but anyone that has a problem with how we express our outrage and spends their time tone policing others from a high horse of privilege and comfort - mansplaining to us how manners are a priority do more to lend cover and legitimizes fascism than they do for the cause of a civil society.
Stop making false equivalencies, stop shaming our warriors for standing up to evil and stop providing cover for monsters. Stop. Just motherfucking stop. Stop or just get the fuck out of the way. Some of us don't want to die in Gilead.
So I repeat: Anyone that has a problem with how we express our outrage - anyone that spends his/her time tone policing others from a high horse of privilege and comfort, mansplaining to us how manners are a priority, do more to lend cover and legitimizes fascism than they do for the cause of a civil society.
ReplyDeleteAnd I cannot think of anything more insidiously incivil from well mannered people than providing cover for monsters.
ReplyDeleteThom Thomas If you wish to be a slave to dictionaries, note that the first definition is not "politeness" but "formal politeness." That's why civility is a concern of diplomats, and why the only times people you love may ask you to be civil is when you're being an angry asshole.
ReplyDeleteThom Thomas The second definition is very useful: "the barest observance".
ReplyDeleteThom Thomas In fact, that second definition is so useful that I added it to my blog post. Thank you.
ReplyDeleteWill Shetterly as a student of English Literature and the history of the English language and linguistics and human communication and philosophy (yeah - I had a lot of intersecting interests in college that carried into my life post-college,) I'm well aware of the limitations and the strengths of dictionaries.
ReplyDeleteI'm reminding you of the common usage of 'civility.' Professional word experts measure common usage and adjust meanings over time to accurately reflect shifts in usage. So today, when we look at a dictionary for common words, the dictionary is often pretty accurate in summing up the common usage of a particular word or set of words.
Notice the screen grab regarding synonyms and trace the interconnectivity of meaning woven between the words 'civil' and 'polite' and 'manners'.
Most people aren't going to parse and use a term like 'civility' as jargonistically as liberal whites longing for the good old days where people were polite and well mannered - or, civil as it were.
Whether or not your particular usage varies from common usage, what you are doing is essentially tone policing people's outrage.
When I read "civility" I read "formal politeness." Formal politeness in the face of savagery is pomp and foolishness.
The time for formality is over. Sometimes just rebelling against oppression, even incivilly, is to Do the Right Thing (great movie by Spike Lee. If you don't understand my reference, watch it again. The owner of the pizza shop was by most accounts relatively civil. And yet, who did Spike Lee have "doing the right thing" at the end? Very powerful narrative.)
You are blind to the privilege of your own whiteness and maleness. I believe you are confusing formality and manners with just and right action and human decency.
If you witness someone brutally abusing a child right in front of you - are you going to be civil - that is - formally polite or are you going ignore protocol and immediately separate the child from the violence?
Another failing of civility is that often there are times when formal manners is an affront to human decency. I'll let you think through that yourself. If you find yourself stumped, let me know and I'll help you out.
In fact, some have argued that social formality is a kind of power flex and can be quite effective in tactical oppression. For a working model of this with regards to language - see the film My Fair Lady.
Thom Thomas If you want to play the credentials game, see my entry on Wikipedia.
ReplyDeleteIf you want to argue this, read my blog post. If you don't, good luck with incivility.
shetterly.blogspot.com - Three reasons the left should learn from the civil rights movement and reclaim civility
Will Shetterly Nonviolence is predicated on a better nature and social conscience on those it's appealing to. That very barely worked for the US Civil Rights movement, and wouldn't have had it been limited to the south.
ReplyDeleteThe cure to Fascism was a world-wide incivility.
Will Shetterly So you are proudly spending your time tone policing others and mansplaining (as I did on the efficacy of dictionaries) to us how manners are a top priority even though the net effect of your tone policing is to provide cover and legitimize fascism and to demoralize average citizens that want to be active, on the ground, in the real world, not some fantasy of a past Leave it to Beaver golden age of your childhood?
ReplyDeleteAnd that by providing cover to fascists and in demoralizing good people, that you are directly and irrevocably accelerating the decline of a civil society?
You actually think you are doing good?
Nice Wikipedia brag there. Indeed an arrogant deluded white liberal blind to his own rise in class and the net effects of his skin privilege and the cultural blindness such comforts can rack one's eyes with.
ReplyDeleteThom Thomas Dude, you do love to attack people. I ain't no liberal. And, unlike you, I'm no identitarian either.
ReplyDeleteEdward Morbius The civil rights movement won. We don't live under Jim Crow. What lost was the next movement, the one for democratic socialism. That died with King and Malcolm X.
ReplyDeleteThom Thomas I suppose instead of sharing my creds, I could've just called you out on your posing about being a student of English. No big.
ReplyDeleteWill Shetterly Your insistence on ideological purity provides cover for monsters. Such moralist manner-making lent cover to Hitler and the rise of world wide fascism in the 1930s and 40s and likely added to the body count of the the genocide. You don't get to pick and chose the history you remember so that you can feel good about your religious faith in the ideology of your choosing. Real life doesn't fit into an ideology.
ReplyDeleteYour smoke screen of "civility" is to reject using the power of your privilege to help culturally define how unacceptable fascism is.
You are trapped in the theoretical ivory tower of your own mind fretting over spilled tea cups unaware of the slaughter happening in the villages about you.
Thom Thomas If the time for civility is past, why aren't you out there shooting the monsters?
ReplyDeleteMuting out.
ReplyDeleteWill Shetterly You wrote: " I suppose instead of sharing my creds, I could've just called you out on your posing about being a student of English. No big."
ReplyDeleteVery civil of you. But who is doing the posing now?
Re: student of English - that's just a fact about myself. As is the fact that I'm a college drop out and largely autodidactic. But I guess you're going to hold this lack of formality against me too.
Maybe you share a similar education in English - good for you - there are lots of us.
If so, then you should realize how stupid a comment like "a slave to dictionaries" is.
In our back and forth, you've done little to convince me otherwise that you are so full of yourself that you can't shit without loving your own smell.
I stand by my go fuck yourself comment. You and people like you are a big part how we ended up where we are.
Blocking Thom Thomas now, not for abusiveness, but for a greater sin, boringness.
ReplyDeleteWill Shetterly I don't have a working gun and I'm not a good shot. I do what I can with the resources that I have. I could be doing more. I wish I was more neurotypical - I would do more. As it is, I'm lucky if I can get to work, not forget to pay the mortgage and get the kids to school/day camp on time.
ReplyDeleteIf I could manage my time in a way that allowed me to write and maintain a blog, I would not be wasting time and effort on tone policing and undermining allies and warriors working to push back against fascism and strip them of their power culturally in hopes of avoiding a war that will certainly be the start of a new dark age for humanity and a severe fall backwards with regards to global human rights.
If I were more abled, I'd be in restaurants and in stores reminding these agents of fascism that people oppose what they are doing - that what they are doing is wrong. I would be working hard to make sure they understood what discomfort and besiegement felt like so that maybe - just maybe, they'd have experience from with which they could begin to empathize with the disenfranchised.
And if not, then I'd hope to embolden others to stand in total resistance. In basketball, we'd call it a full court press. Similar concept in soccer. The idea is to engage (in all 50 states you might say) on every front to destabilize their hold on power.
No, on second thought, I'll simply disengage. I hate blocking people.
ReplyDeleteGo in peace, Thom Thomas.
Will Shetterly It's not really taking the high ground when you dribble your wisdom upon us from your ivory tower.
ReplyDeleteAll the kindness and civility you and other white liberals love to champion - I save that for people that need it.
Not mentally bloated self-satisfied tone police that provide cover for Nazis and stormtroopers.
And there won't be any peace until children are out of their cages and reunited with their parents and environmental protections are back in place and we have better access to healthcare. I'm sorry you find improving the wellbeing of people more boring than sermonizing about manners.
Once the children are with their loved ones and children can go to school without fear of getting gunned down, and black boys and men can live in peace, maybe I'll have time to work on my manners.
But hey - glad you have your priorities. If we survive this, I'm sure your self important blathering blog entries will serve as important instruction. Right there beside Ms Manners and Permit Patty and Larry Law&Order.
I hope you wake up. Your comics could be useful.
My ivory tower? Dude, I live in a working class neighborhood and my income is below the poverty level.
ReplyDeleteAnd I know this is hard to grasp, but I'm a socialist. Your identitarianism comes from liberals like Derrick Bell and Kimberle Crenshaw. Do a little research, please.
plus.google.com - Photo - Google+
ReplyDeleteWill Shetterly So do I (live in a working class neighborhood.) I'm still more privileged than my majority African American neighbors.
ReplyDeleteI've done lots of research. I'm not any kind of ist other than realist. Identity politics are real. If you don't believe me, look at the unveiling and acceptance of white supremacy.
For Jewish people to decry anti-semitism isn't identitarianism - it is them speaking to reality.
Sexism, racism, homophobia - all these things are as real as classism. To deny that is to deny reality.
You can't extricate white supremacy and misogyny from issues of class. I mean, you can try, but to do so is to stupidly ignore reality.
You want to live in a theoretical world - cool - you do your thing. But don't provide cover for fascist. Don't be that guy in history urging a moderate response to Hitler in the face of the coming holocaust.
I've read your blog posts and your G+ comics - I think you want to be better than that. Well, do be better than that.
Good people are going to fight back and maybe break social conventions or rules of formal politeness. Let it go.
Focus on the real moral outrages. We don't need Ms. Manners right now.
We need Malcom X and Harvey Milk and Emma Goldman and Joe Hill and John Brown and others that are willing to risk being wrong to protect what is right.
Thom Thomas I support you in your anger, and its expression. There is much injustice, and danger of even more. You can trust that I am working to support the oppressed, in whatever ways they require me to, that I am able to do. Not all of my efforts are, or will be, civil.
ReplyDeleteI think that Will Shetterly is also a fellow traveler in that regard.
But I'm firmly convinced that shouting and shaming isn't going to be enough, partly because just fussing isn't the same as breaking and remaking things.
Also because I've seen shouting and shaming used against the oppressed.
You think I'm not doing enough? Not doing it right? You're allowed to think and say so.
I am comfortably uncomfortable with my level of effort. I worry that it isn't enough (and that there never will be enough to make some of this better) and I worry that if I do too much, that I won't be able to keep going (and that I know this will be a long, long struggle).
You want to keep hollering? Go ahead. It isn't helping me, but it isn't ruining my day, either.
I feel your pain, but as you've pointed out, you are not the most in harm's way of all the folks I know. Those people have other things for me to do.
Thom Thomas You're a white guy in a lot of pain, which is awkward in this identitarian age, so I feel for you. You'd do well to think about whether your rage is making you less effective. Since you mentioned Malcolm X, you might try to follow his excellent advice:
ReplyDelete"Be peaceful, be courteous, obey the law, respect everyone; but if someone puts his hand on you, send him to the cemetery." —Malcolm X
Drew McCarthy I don't know whether your are or not doing enough. I can't make that judgement, even if I knew your life intimately. How is it that some feel justified in belittling the effort of people even if it is just hollering at and shaming oppressors?
ReplyDeleteI think people mistake why such efforts are done. You think it is to change their minds. I'm guessing these folks engaging in direct action protests know that these folks won't change their oppressive ways.
The aim is to harass and harangue the bullies enough to disrupt their efforts and to show people that they are not untouchable. To empower and embolden people to resist and to rally people to find their own ways to revolt.
It is tactical. Getting into the heads of our enemies is an effective manner of destabilising their hold on power.
It also helps shifts the frame of what is and isn't acceptable. Despite the negative light "hissy fits" are seen in, they are effective over the long term. Just look at how skewed reporting is to the right because of the constant whining by the right about how the facts journalism has a liberal bias. Now, instead of accurate reporting, we are given "both sidesism."
We can deny that the right had been waging a culture war since the 1970s and we're woefully unprepared. But that won't stop Christofascists. And instead of protecting people, we're taking people to task for their bad manners?
Regarding "hollering and shaming" being used on the oppressed, once again, you are engaging in a false equivalency. The differences are ones of scale that have to do with power and disenfranchisement.
If a drunken father hollers and shames an abused mother, it severely damages the children and the mother. If an angry son fights back and hollers and shames his drunken abusive father, it empowers the young man with agency and might be the first step in helping mother and children break free of likely death.
Read Martin Espada's poem, Imagine the Angels of Bread. Meditate on it. Think on the powerful vs the dispossessed.
If you still don't understand how hollering and shaming oppressors is not even remotely the same as hollering and shaming the oppressed, we're so completely fucked I may as well seek asylum in Canada for me and my family.
http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/power-of-one/2266
ReplyDeleteHere's a clip:
if every rebellion begins with the idea
that conquerors on horseback are not many-legged gods, that they too drown
if plunged in the river,
then this is the year.
So may every humiliated mouth,
teeth like desecrated headstones,
fill with the angels of bread.
- -
I can't read this poem with out crying. This is the year. So may every humiliated mouth, like desecrated headstones, fill with the angels of bread.
I've lived such a privileged life and yet I know a fraction of that humiliation. And I can imagine my life without those angels - and knowing that others are being politely and formally crushed under boots breaks my goddamned heart and tears my soul to pieces.
And I'm willing to fail and make mistakes as I imagine a world without slave manicals.
To put it another way:
We need body rocking, not perfection, let me see some action in the back section.
http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/power-of-one/2266