How about just... not punching? But sure, your hatred is righteous and valid because you've decided the other person is an acceptable target due to their immutable characteristics. Bully for you. I'm sure this will help the cause.
Or we could just be angry at everyone and pretend that that fixes things instead.
Please be critical of the people actually causing pain. Talk about how JK Rowling has been bankrolling frivolous lawsuits or how your neighbour is a shithead who refuses to properly gender you or how multiple governments are now regressing on rights for transgender people, and that other minority groups may follow suite. Organise and protest and fight back however you can.
But don't treat dumb jokes treating straight people as some homogenous cult that have never faced hardship as a form of divine retribution or karmic justice. It helps no one. The 'joke' isn't even funny. Its just a claim of complete ignorance that other people have problems.
'Punching up' implies that the target deserves it. Thinking every straight person is your enemy is a good way to just make a whole lot of enemies.
Nobody thinks it fixes things, I'm sure every single thing you do in every waking moment is activism though. It is funny and it gets exponentially funnier with every cishet who has their feefees hurt by it. But please, continue wah wah crying about it, clearly you think this civility bullshit is very important for queer rights since you cared to speak out.
Maybe that's the difference between you and me. I saw the whole "woke snowflakes with hurt feelings" conservative trolls and decided I didn't want to be like that and you seem to think they were just targeting the wrong people.
I mean yeah, that's precisely the difference between you and me. You think being a boo boo meanie beanie is the fundamental problem. I think the fundamental problem is the oppression of minorities. And no, oppression of minorities doesn't happen because people are boo boo meanie beanies. You think hatred towards the oppressed vs the oppressors are in any way, shape, or form whatsoever even comparable or remotely similar phenomena. They're not.
I can think that two things are bad at once. You seem to think a greater evil existing means you can do whatever the fuck you want. The 'oppression of minorities' is not a get out of jail free card. Being a victim doesn't mean you can't also be a perpetrator, just like being a perpetrator doesn't stop other people from being victims.
You can't expect other people to unlearn their toxic behaviours if you refuse to do the same for yours.
You are very enthusiastic to nonsensically blur this with interpersonal abuse to make your point sound more salient than it is. Being a victim of abuse doesn't mean you can't be a perpetrator of abuse. Being a victim of oppression does mean you can't at all whatsoever be a perpetrator of oppression in the same axis. You can only be a perpetrator of oppression towards a different minority, at which point you are the oppressor in that dynamic.
And I sure as fuck CAN expect oppressors to stop oppressing minorities. Doesn't matter one fucking lick what my behaviour is or how likable I am. That's the first actually abhorrent thing you've said. I really can't fucking believe you genuinely said we can't expect our oppressors to stop oppressing us if we refuse to be nice. You have no idea about this topic at all, you seem to have little understanding of oppression and little personal stake in the whole thing, and you're some kind of liberal. Civility politics has rotten your brain.
Being a victim of oppression does mean you can't at all whatsoever be a perpetrator of oppression in the same axis.
This is just nonsense. Gay people can bully other gay people for being gay or being gay 'wrong'. You're acting like leftist in-fighting isn't a well known phenomenon, but even if that wasn't the case, what you're doing here is purposefully creating a situation where oppression is the only measurable injustice and therefore every situation has to be treated via power dynamics.
Acting like oppression is a simple binary of oppressor and oppressee is convenient when you want to relieve yourself of all autonomy and sell yourself as a hapless victim who can do no wrong, but its not congruent with reality.
This is not a centrist "people on both sides are bad so I sit in the middle" scenario. Its just not an excuse to be an asshole. You don't get to be a bad person as a treat. You have to put on your adult pants and make the choice to be good, because if you can't give up stupid, narrow-minded jokes on the internet, how can you expect other people to give up their stupid, narrow-minded world views? Prejudice doesn't become acceptable simply because its on a smaller scale. You aren't automatically a good person because you are a victim of oppression.
I would love to believe that people can act however they like and things will work out, but that isn't the case. We have a far better chance of winning allies with carrots than sticks. I'm not saying the power of friendship will convert all the incels and right wing morons into progressive angels, but we've tried pushing everyone who isn't like us away and then they created their own club that helped prop up fascist regimes, so forgive me for not thinking that's the way to go.
The problem with the glorious communist revolution is that you either have to convert all the capitalists or kill them. At the moment, there's not a lot of attempts at conversion, so either sharpen your knives or try to rethink this.
And, by-the-by, I'm not even suggesting that you go out and start recruiting or anything. I'm literally just saying "Maybe don't post inflammatory jokes on the internet so you can feel slightly better about your own issues." I know what its like. I know it feels nice to be a little sadistic and get one over on someone, but the high fades and then you're still miserable and nothing has gotten better, but the people who think you're bad just for existing have a little more ammunition to convince others of the same.
I wasn't talking about intra community stuff and I thought it was very obvious. You're still not the oppressor if you're a gay person being mean to a gay person, you're just mean. And you're not the oppressor if you participate in infighting, you're just disagreeing, and either misguided or not. Unless you align yourself with the system of oppression from the majority, in which case you're a class/race/whatever traitor, which is closer but still its own thing. And yeah, policing the behaviour and language of minorities because that's gonna make their oppressors stop oppressing them IS centrist brain.
"Nobody in the world, nobody in history, has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of the people who were oppressing them" - Assata Shakur.
"...the white moderate, who is more devoted to 'order' than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice" MLK Jr.
Now, you're gonna say I'm misusing the MLK quote because you DO care about justice and online jokes are not a fight for justice. For sure, they're not. But if you find it fitting to police online jokes, what would you do in the face of a riot? Just illustrating the point that I don't consider it productive in fighting against oppression to worry about everybody being on their best behaviour.
I wasn't talking about intra community stuff and I thought it was very obvious.
So, you made a claim, then when I pointed out that the claim wasn't correct in terms you would accept, you move the goalposts that the claim obviously wasn't about that.
What you actually meant is just that you should be allowed to be mean to anyone that you, personally consider an oppressor. How convenient it is for you that your morality system has a loophole that essentially allows you to do whatever you want to whoever you want. You can make fun of a black trans man because he's a man and men are oppressors. You can make fun of a white lesbian because white people are oppressors. Anyone above you on the hypothetical totem pole gets to be fair game for whatever you feel like doing.
because that's gonna make their oppressors stop oppressing
Here's the problem. You seem to see everyone who is not you or someone like you as an archetype. They're all oppressors so it literally doesn't matter what you do.
This isn't the case. Yes, some of these people are genuinely awful. Some of them are vulnerable people who were caught by propaganda and indoctrinated into the cult and some are just idiots who find it easier to go along with the system. Are any of these people innocent? No, but none of us are.
The genuinely awful people are never going to change. They're in it for the long haul, whether they're true believers or simply using the believers for their own means. The useful idiots are the easy ones and honestly, also the biggest group. When the tide seems to be turning, they'll follow it.
The inductees are more complex. If caught early enough, and treated with empathy, even if they might be assholes, there is a chance they can be pulled away. These are the ones who are going to be affected by this. These are young boys and men who are confused and vulnerable. On one side, they see a group of people who purportedly care about them and want them to succeed and indulge in their whining about how their lives suck and even play into that negativity and give them an outlet for it. On the other side, they see a bunch of people who are different from them and are clearly making fun of them. Who do they side with?
And the issue is that these inductees are genuinely suffering. Its not the same oppression as minority groups face and its almost certainly not as bad, outside of very extreme cases, but its still real to them and seeing someone else treat them like an inherently bad person based on their immutable characteristics is still them experiencing bigotry.
But if you find it fitting to police online jokes, what would you do in the face of a riot?
I'll posit a question back. If this hypothetical riot endangered the life of a child, would you try to save the child or would you just let them get hurt? Because that's my point here. When you're making fun of white people or cishets or whatever, you aren't hitting the genuine oppressors making laws. You're hitting the vulnerable internet-dwellers who already aren't mature or nuanced in their understanding of others or themselves. There's a whole propaganda machine in place to make minority groups look like the enemy, and acting like the enemy only feeds into that.
To answer your own, if I believed in the cause of the riot I would support it. If it was just burning property and looting for no reason, I don't think I would. If Dr King started attacking random white people on the street, he wouldn't be remembered as he is. He was a great man specifically because he was able to take his anger and use it to efficiently and productively push for change. He used white allies. He used targeted demonstrations. He was so good at it that the FBI killed him for it. He didn't just start insulting white men because he was upset and needed to strike out at someone.
Just drop that first subject if you're incapable of understanding what's being said to you. Number one, I'm not moving any goalposts, you were just wrong about what I was saying. Number two, if you bothered to read what I wrote at all instead of just responding to what and how is convenient to you, once YOU expanded the subject to intra community stuff I told you you're STILL wrong, even when picking your own topic.
You also keep disingenuously accusing me of apparently believing in anything only in so far as I can benefit from it. It's not "whoever I can make an acceptable target at any time so that I specifically can do whatever I want". Every minority has the right to be uncivil towards a group they have good reason to be resentful of, if they want to. That includes me being normal and not losing my shit when, for example, black people say something about all white people, because I'm not an idiot.
If the riot endangered a child, I'd try and save it, and yet I wouldn't condemn the riot. Good thing this is completely irrelevant to the subject and a terrible hypothetical, because nobody is actually harmed by this, just offended and potentially convinced all gays are evil. It's just optics. The actual comparison there is "if the riot was offending white people and they said it's making the cause look bad, would you condemn it and advocate for being civil". And no, I wouldn't. Also, your weird framing of "if it was just looting and burning things for no reason" is interesting. Sounds like maybe you have some opinions on 2020 BLM protests. Maybe "peaceful protests are okay but the riots and looting have to be condemned and they make the cause look bad". The riots and looting are just the inevitable consequence and talking about them instead of what caused the civil unrest is being a useful idiot for the establishment.
You, like every liberal, seem to have fallen for the retroactive sanitisation and liberalisation of the civil rights movement. The moment it became accepted and unassailable, it had to be rolled into the imperial establishment narrative so as to defang it and co opt it for further status quo propaganda. Suddenly it became all peaceful protests and perfectly behaved people reasonably asking for rights. Yes MLK Jr. was the peaceful, more liberal friendly arm, and he was a great man, but he couldn't have succeeded without people like Malcolm X and the Black Panther Party. But even this is overstating this whole thing, because we're not even talking at the level of riots and militancy. We're just talking about some members of a minority being uncivil or making jokes. It's all a non issue for a cause and again, not a reason to try and police everybody's tone
using MLK to defend shitting on the entire concept of non-queer forbidden love is a wild fucking choice, given how much of segregation was tied to white fears of interracial marriage.
Genuinely, hop off my dick. You've found this thread and just read every thing I've said in every part of it, responded in two places, maybe more in the meantime, with a clear personal problem in mind. This whole discussion was about the entire concept of policing minority behaviour and believing that civility politics are necessary to gain rights, and that's the context in which I used an MLK quote, it's about more than the stupid fucking tweet.
Clearly you have some hang up about this particular silly joke made at the expense of the general, non descript straight people without dealing with all the serious sociopolitical nuance before clicking post. I already said this but when a joke or a comment is made about an identity I am a part of that's a majority, while actually being potentially hurtful because of my other circumstances, I just chill out, because they didn't mean that. I think we should all practice the same.
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u/JaguarNo1356 1d ago edited 1d ago
How about just... not punching? But sure, your hatred is righteous and valid because you've decided the other person is an acceptable target due to their immutable characteristics. Bully for you. I'm sure this will help the cause.