It all comes Tumblring down

Mistborn · Post by **Mistborn** » Sat May 03, 2014 6:45 pm

So I often hear people on the internet railing against the "social justice warriors" from tumblr, however those people are usually assholes and generally the sort of people who should have mean thing said about them on the internet. On the other hand I occasionally hear about people like the gal behind the "Cancel Colbert" kerfuffle. So I guess I'm asking what's the ratio of useful advocacy to counterproductive trolling in the social justice blogosphere.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Sat May 03, 2014 7:34 pm

There is lots of good social justice and economics work in the blogosphere. i'm not aware of anything productive happening on Tumblr though. It's basically a bunch of cat photos and whining about pop music. It's about one step removed from icanhazcheeseburger. I'm sure anyone attempting to be productive in social justice on Tumblr is about as successful as people who are attempting to contact aliens or get snappier outfits for cats on Tumblr. If you want to read a bunch of social justice blogs with concrete plans for action, go read daily kos or something.

-Username17

DSMatticus · Post by **DSMatticus** » Sat May 03, 2014 8:01 pm

Tumblr's SJW crowd is pretty fucking crazy all-in-all. Nominally, they stand for ideals sane people would support. In practice, they're an insular bandwagon community with no cohesive platform that shouts down any and all detractors as sexists/racists/whatever. If an extremist gets into an argument with the voice of reason on tumblr, the extremist wins. Because they get to play the sexist/racist card, and once that card is dropped the conversation is over and now it's about how terrible that evil sexist/racist douche is are and how great they are as a community for realizing that other dude was the bad guy all along. Naturally, that sort of environment fosters extremism.

Normal people just do not give a fuck about the SJW crowd. They don't really accomplish anything. Odds are that if the SJW crowd is outraged at something, it is already a mainstream issue or it is completely fucking retarded and they will either get no traction at all with the mainstream OR completely humiliate themselves when their stance gets mainstream scrutiny. They are a non-issue.

In the conservative echo chamber, literally every person who disagrees with them on egalitarian matters is a tumblr SJW, and then they spend a bunch of time making fun of tumblr SJW's. It's a Two Minutes Hate ritual - here is your strawman, comrades; let us beat him together! So when you hear people talking about tumblr SJW's like they matter, you can be pretty confident you are dealing with a person who is an even bigger shitstain than the people they're bitching about (who, yes, are also shitstains).

Whipstitch · Post by **Whipstitch** » Sat May 03, 2014 11:55 pm

In general I'm more concerned that people think "social justice warrior" is a useful pejorative than I am by the idea that some people make dumb, overzealous arguments on the internet.

DragonChild · Post by **DragonChild** » Sun May 04, 2014 1:47 am

Whipstitch wrote:In general I'm more concerned that people think "social justice warrior" is a useful pejorative than I am by the idea that some people make dumb, overzealous arguments on the internet.

This, a thousand times. Most of the people I've found who use it as an insult have no problem being friends with actual, literal, self-identified nazis. Yeah, really, that group is surprisingly huge on tumblr. But somehow people like redditors want to spend more time making fun of actual disabled children than they do nazis. You get one guess as to why.

I've seen a lot of people screamed at for being 'sjws' for just being... well, themselves. Lesbians yelled at for being sjws for being lesbians, black people yelled at for sjws for being black, etc. You get people who are yelled at just for saying stuff like "Disabled people are treated kinda shitty in america". The way tumblr works basically helps a lot of people who are alike get together and talk about stuff, and surprise surprise, bigots don't like it when minorities do that.

Also, I'd disagree about the 'no real activism' - it's on a much more individual level, mind, and it's something you have to be receptive to. There's a lot I've only heard about and learned about and become a better person from because its on tumblr. You also have great blogs like medievalpoc or racebending who do great work in educating people in really interesting ways. But more than anything else, it's segmented - you're not going to find that stuff unless you look for it, or are receptive to it, or follow people who want to share it.

Edit: Also, you have to take everything you read said coming from 'sjws' with a grain of salt. There have been a lot of people who have anonymous messages sent to them that say kill all white people... only whoops, it turns out people sent those messages to THEMSELVES to try to make non-white people look bad. That shit happens a lot. A LOT. A lot of the "tumblr sjws are nasty evil people" blogs even go around sending those messages themselves, making fake accounts, in order to make groups of people they don't like (that is, people who aren't straight cis white men) look bad.

tussock · Post by **tussock** » Sun May 04, 2014 9:04 am

There's more than porn on tumblr? Oh, right.

Anyhoo, tumblr is a platform that accumulates your personal likes and comments onto your own page. Someone who follows you then chooses what to further accumulate from your page onto theirs, often with added snark chains. But they never see anyone else's comments on that same thing, because that's more work. A bunch of highly followed people are just content trolls, not producers.

So if it's a real eye-popper, in any sense, good, bad, ugly, porn, all the above; it goes everywhere and everyone sees it. Some people take advantage of the total lack of filters and fact-checking that drives the system to just do fake eye-poppers. And those go around faster than anything because they neatly hit all of everyone's buttons.

And there's a side effect, where one person can say "I'd like people to not use that word about me" in a really nice way on their own page, and then suddenly it's on a thousand pages with a comment below it from some random teen fanboi who got content trolled suggesting that become a universal law or something, followed by more comments about how oppressive everyone is on tumblr. And that has taken a huge life of it's own in recent times.

And yeh, people who are offended by social justice can go fuck themselves. I get that not everyone's great at expressing themselves all the time and tumbler magnifies that incredibly, but the people on Team Halfling are the social justice ones. Don't be on Team Troll, no one's oppressing rich white heterosexual males, especially not on fucking tumblr. Where the only things on your page are what you fucking well put there.

Which should really be more porn and less social justice, M'kay.

schpeelah · Post by **schpeelah** » Sun May 04, 2014 10:07 am

Whipstitch wrote:In general I'm more concerned that people think "social justice warrior" is a useful pejorative than I am by the idea that some people make dumb, overzealous arguments on the internet.

To be perfectly honest, someone calling themselves a "social justice warrior" on the internet does not instill my confidence in them.

Whipstitch · Post by **Whipstitch** » Sun May 04, 2014 2:07 pm

schpeelah wrote:To be perfectly honest, someone calling themselves a "social justice warrior" on the internet does not instill my confidence in them.

Well, yeah, that'd seem obviously self-aggrandizing, which is why SJW is automatically treated as a pejorative--it's a label anyone with a modicum of self-awareness only takes on in jest and/or to acknowledge how shrill the conversation has become. But I think the fact that it's so automatically recognized as a bad thing also says a lot about the US political climate in general. Being "too reasonable" for politics is an unexamined default position for many people and that's a shame.

tussock · Post by **tussock** » Mon May 05, 2014 4:05 am

PS: Privilege.

Turns out if you're a white hetero male in the US, and are the type who gets told to "check your privilege" once or twice, that gets you an article in Time Magazine about how waa waa waa fucking crybaby.

Really. http://www.donotlink.com/framed?29531

As if Time would publish a thing by some well-to-do black kid who talked about actual police harassment or prison statistics or school budgets or the reality of modern segregation or being taken off the electoral role because you have a "black" name for fucks sake, or how the supreme court is cool with that because "racism is over", by a majority decision of old white men. Or had the audacity to point out that as a black woman she gets paid about half of a white guy's salary in the same damn job.

h/t: http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/ who is a constant pleasure to read.

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Mon May 05, 2014 7:39 am

Ok, time for the latest installment of "Prak is a horrible bigot who is somehow queer and bi/pan/whateversexual." Posted here because it's vaguely related.

Can someone explain to me what appropriation is (and isn't), why it's bad/what makes it bad for white girls to wear headscarves (other than Social Justicers thinking that White Girls are the root of all evil) and why the fuck I should give a shit about England and Japan loving curry and Americans wearing native aesthetics as fashion?

TiaC · Post by **TiaC** » Mon May 05, 2014 8:53 am

I think it's generally an objection to things like the English claiming curry as an important part of their culture when it only came to England after they conquered and oppressed the culture its native to. Basically, using pieces of another culture without understanding its significance or the history involved.

momothefiddler · Post by **momothefiddler** » Mon May 05, 2014 8:57 am

Prak_Anima wrote:Ok, time for the latest installment of "Prak is a horrible bigot who is somehow queer and bi/pan/whateversexual." Posted here because it's vaguely related.

Shhh. The link tussock just posted seems to show that being a member of a group that has been oppressed doesn't magically keep you from being a giant shitbag. Granted, I don't get some of the accusations that have been leveled at you either, but this is not a great defense. Anyway.

Prak_Anima wrote:Can someone explain to me what appropriation is (and isn't), why it's bad/what makes it bad for white girls to wear headscarves (other than Social Justicers thinking that White Girls are the root of all evil) and why the fuck I should give a shit about England and Japan loving curry and Americans wearing native aesthetics as fashion?

I still have a hard time knowing what's appropriation and what it's not, but I did finally recently get some insight into why it's a problem. It's largely linked to imperialism, to my understanding. See, if you go live with some people, and you ask about their special clothing, and you learn about their religious significance, and you join them in the appropriate rituals, it's ok to wear the special religious garb while you do so. If you go kill a bunch of people and enslave a bunch more and take some of their fancy clothes back home to wear so you can show off your new ~exotic~ fashion, they have every right to be pissed at you about it.

I love curry, and nobody's ever told me that's appropriation, so I don't know if that was hyperbole on your part. I wouldn't be surprised if people actually said that, though. I don't know how it could be a problem, but maybe I'm missing something important.

But when I realized that taking a headdress that has a lot of important meaning and symbolism to some people and wearing it as quirky fashion is a lot like being so depressed as a style choice, I could relate to the people who are angry about it.

TiaC wrote:I think it's generally an objection to things like the English claiming curry as an important part of their culture when it only came to England after they conquered and oppressed the culture its native to. Basically, using pieces of another culture without understanding its significance or the history involved.

Someone once told me (I have no justification for this story and a quick search didn't find any, so take it as you like) that curry wasn't originally about being spicy like it is now, and that a large part of the heat in British-style curries is due to the fact that the soldiers occupying India had natives making the curry for them and the natives were well aware that the British soldiers would be MEN about it and not show weakness in front of each other and had fun making the curries as hot as possible.
And that story amuses me, while making the point that it's not really an English thing in the slightest.

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Mon May 05, 2014 9:12 am

Yeah, someone on tumblr said something along those lines to, specifically explaining that Miley Cyrus twerking is appropriation because she's praised as a feminist when she does it, while black women who do it are called trashy.

I'm not sold on the idea that twerking is a black thing. It's an American thing, or maybe a Western thing, and maybe it should be said to be a black American/Western thing, but I'm not sold on the idea that it's exclusively black only. But the feeling I get from that way of looking at appropriation is that it's really more about how the majority society treats/looks at something, as opposed to how the individual does.

An example would be a yukata that I have.

I'm a middle class white kid from the suburbs. I went through my otaku phase, and have gotten over it, but still enjoy a lot of things from Japanese culture. My yukata is a light weight robe I can wear around the house in the skin-blistering Sacramento summers, or wear open as a summer weight overcoat when I feel like it/am going to club. It's harder to claim that this is appropriation, since, culturally, a yukata was a casual garment worn for almost these exact purposes. But I'm sure there are some people who would do so.

As to the accusations- no, I'm pretty horrible at identifying with others and understanding their perspectives and viewpoints. It's why I ask stupid questions like "is an eagle nazis used in some of their imagery offensive if you take away the swastika?" Because to me, the swastika is the problematic part, the eagle is just a cool looking eagle that is completely harmless, and I know that is probably not a typical viewpoint on the subject.

momothefiddler · Post by **momothefiddler** » Mon May 05, 2014 9:24 am

I haven't yet summoned the interest to research the origins of twerking. Honestly, I doubt I ever will. I don't even know what it is, since all I've gotten from context is "dancing by shaking your ass" and I seriously doubt that's culture-specific enough to be appropriated. So I don't know enough to speak on that one.

I don't know anything about a yukata either, but if you're right that your use and the traditional use are pretty much the same, and you're not trying to make yourself out to be the inventor of it or a better person because of it, I don't see the problem. Seems a lot like enjoying the taste of curry to me.

And yeah, I know what you mean about the eagle. I've argued that the confederate (CSA) flag wasn't inherently bad, because the CSA wasn't entirely bad, etc. The issue there I guess is that symbols don't have inherent meaning, they serve as foci for association, and now that the flag is associated primarily with slavery, using it conveys, intentional or not, an association with slavery. Same with the eagle and nazism, I guess. Pity, because it is cool looking. But so is SS as twin lightning bolts, and I'm not gonna be using that for anything that abbreviates to SS either.

Dean · Post by **Dean** » Mon May 05, 2014 7:49 pm

Remember when DSM very correctly pointed out that the tumblr world has a lot of things in it that are internally inconsistent and crumble under even basic intellectual scrutiny? This is one of those times. Cultural Appropriation is a bullshit thing that people who are comfortable saying bullshit talk a lot about. It is a ridiculous and ill defined concept which makes no sense on any level. Taking good ideas from other cultures and incorporating them into your own is how every culture has evolved since forever and rallying against that fact makes you painfully retarded. Cultural appropriation is unconditionally good and without it the world would be worse in every way.
Satellites were pioneered by the Russians so only they should be able to use cell phones. Modern Medicine is almost entirely an invention of the French, Germans, and Americans so by all means lets stop sending vaccines to Africa. Stand up comedy is something the British created so by all means I should be arrested for doing it. On and on. So ideally in a world without cultural appropriation most countries could be a humorless cultural hellhole without industry, technology, or media. There is absolutely no way that an internally consistent platform can be made against cultural appropriation because even incredibly offensive and ignorant things like Minstrel Shows are the beginnings of one culture beginning to learn and accept another.

Maj · Post by **Maj** » Mon May 05, 2014 7:52 pm

According to Wikipedia...

Cultural appropriation is the adoption of some specific elements of one culture by a different cultural group. It describes acculturation or assimilation, but can imply a negative view towards acculturation from a minority culture by a dominant culture. It can include the introduction of forms of dress or personal adornment, music and art, religion, language, or social behavior. These elements, once removed from their indigenous cultural contexts, can take on meanings that are significantly divergent from, or merely less nuanced than, those they originally held.

A while back, I read this blog post on the supposed difference between cultural appropriation and cultural exchange. It talks about "being invited" to participate in a culture.

I have lots of mixed feelings on the subject. Many of them involve me telling other people to shut the fuck up.

virgil · Post by **virgil** » Mon May 05, 2014 8:18 pm

I've always understood accusations of appropriation to be when people (hipsters, iconically) incorporate a cultural practice, treat it as 'exotic' (which marginalizes it), or even claim greater cultural understanding/proficiency in said practice than those they obtained it from. AKA, when they're an insensitive jerk about it.

Whipstitch · Post by **Whipstitch** » Mon May 05, 2014 9:47 pm

deanruel87 wrote: Taking good ideas from other cultures and incorporating them into your own is how every culture has evolved since forever and rallying against that fact makes you painfully retarded. Cultural appropriation is unconditionally good and without it the world would be worse in every way.

I'm gonna stop ya here because you're getting a li'l tweaked out about technological advancement when that shit is rarely what gets people ranting about cultural appropriation. Practical items have relatively unambiguous uses while matters of art and fashion do not. You virtually never hear people bitch about those dang Australians using antibiotics or eating paella because we understand that gangrene is terribad and paella is delicious. By contrast, fashion and artistic choices often have no practical value outside of the shit you're signalling with it, which is why some white dude wearing a conical hat and fake buck teeth to the mall is seen as ambiguous at best in 2014 even though everyone is pretty cool with using paper or compasses. Swiping other people's cultural symbols isn't necessarily mean-spirited, but for various reasons people aren't going to automatically believe that you are acting in good faith either. We are after all a species that routinely makes fun of eachother with shit as subtle as puns and satire.

OgreBattle · Post by **OgreBattle** » Tue May 06, 2014 12:09 am

Is saying Black people like fried chicken in a derogatory tone a kind of cultural appropriation? In the sense that, heck, everyone likes fried chicken so why only label a certain group with that.

Maj · Post by **Maj** » Tue May 06, 2014 1:42 am

No, that's just racist.

Fried chicken is a cross between Scottish cuisine when they settled in the southern US, and Caribbean cuisine as it hit the mainland. So Southern Fried Chicken is actually a thing.

Appropriation means taking something from someone. So you could argue that KFC is appropriating Southern Fried Chicken.

Mord · Post by **Mord** » Tue May 06, 2014 4:41 am

tussock wrote:PS: Privilege.

Turns out if you're a white hetero male in the US, and are the type who gets told to "check your privilege" once or twice, that gets you an article in Time Magazine about how waa waa waa fucking crybaby.

Really. http://www.donotlink.com/framed?29531

I guess even Time Magazine isn't too august an institution to print some clickbait every now and again.

I love how Tal Fortgang manages to completely and brazenly misunderstand the meaning of "privilege" while embodying the concept.

Dean · Post by **Dean** » Tue May 06, 2014 5:11 am

Whipstitch wrote:I'm gonna stop ya here because you're getting a li'l tweaked out about technological advancement when that shit is rarely what gets people ranting about cultural appropriation.

But I don't need to chase after the things people choose to complain about because that's a shell game. The things they complain about are random and arbitrary and they can apply the same term to those things because Cultural Appropriation is arbitrarily assigned term with no usable definition. There is no way to define it that lets you have paella and stand up comedy but not indian headresses and twerking. This is why every tumblrite that attempts to defend it gives up the moment they put any thought into it and then tells you it's just about doing things in a good way that they personally think is nice. They admit to using no standards but they do reserve the right to line item veto anything they see based on nothing at all.

There is no workable definition for Cultural Appropriation. If you put any two people in a room they could not possibly agree what it applies to and when those people did disagree they would have no ability to even argue who's case as correct as the entire concept is based on being able to indict anything you want as morally evil with the thin pretense of making a valid sociological statement.

Cultural Appropriation is a non term. It is not a sociologically valid concept. It has no meaning and makes no declarative statements about the things it's applied to. The only thing you can know when you hear someone use the term cultural appropriation is that the person you're listening to is severely misinformed and they get their information from bad sources.

Starmaker · Post by **Starmaker** » Tue May 06, 2014 5:27 am

deanruel87 wrote:Remember when DSM very correctly pointed out that the tumblr world has a lot of things in it that are internally inconsistent and crumble under even basic intellectual scrutiny? This is one of those times. Cultural Appropriation is a bullshit thing that people who are comfortable saying bullshit talk a lot about. It is a ridiculous and ill defined concept which makes no sense on any level.

I refer you to Frank's posts on harmless racism. The bad cultural appropriation is a thing when you take underprivileged people's culture, repackage it, then blast it back at them at full volume using their privileged position and overwhelming media dominance.

I haven't heard about twerking before Miley Cyrus. (Hell, I still haven't seen twerking, I saw a static picture of Miley Cyrus with her ass up in the air against some dude's crotch.) Apparently, it's a style of dancing popular with, and characteristic of, certain groups of black people. Which means Miley's act is blasted back at them, while actual black people who twerk have so little media representation that I haven't heard about it.

Hijab tourism is a thing when white non-Muslim women decide to wear a hijab for "spiritual" reasons. Now, and this is apparently news, modern western Muslims wear hijabs not because they're oppressed by the patriarchy but because that's what they wear, like you are expected to wear pants, they don't fucking need your fake hijabi sister solidarity. And yet whilte privileged hipster asshole women get book deals (!) on the basis of their "spiritual experiences".

The following example doesn't have anything to do with cultural appropriation, but is an example of media dominance: I don't watch romantic comedies. I go out of my way to never see this shit. And yet if asked to picture a wedding, I can only picture an American one. I don't know what happens at a Russian wedding despite living in Russia (I know people sign the registry. In what order? What do they say? What do they do before and after? No idea.)

Basically, imagine Super Sexist 50s where every work with a narrative is either "men doing manly things" or "men doing women's things for a day and looking ironic, hur hur hur". Or, you probably have this sort of thing on TV: any reality show depicting the Disney World version of life in a third-world country or the daily work in a profession, with actual natives or professionals playing nameless extras to the celebrity tourists. "Zomg I'm going to work on an oil platform for a day! So romantic!!!" Cultural appropriation is the same fucked up dynamic (plus you get to be oppressed in your daily life on the basis of your fashionable culture). Even the concept of cultural appropriation is mostly spread by generic Western SJW tumblrites.

Dean · Post by **Dean** » Tue May 06, 2014 5:56 am

Before I respond, do you actually plan to refer me to the posts you're referencing? I will read whatever you'd like but I'm not going to hunt them down.

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Tue May 06, 2014 9:23 am

deanruel87 wrote:Before I respond, do you actually plan to refer me to the posts you're referencing? I will read whatever you'd like but I'm not going to hunt them down.

Which is sadly an amazing level of willingness to argue in good faith for the den...