Learn to mitigate your own damage and remember to tip fat.
Booked a hotel to stay in Seattle to visit my father on his deathbed. He died before I got there. It's weird because we really only met a few months ago. It's the death of a stranger who has the same eyes as me, so the most I can grieve is the fantasy of a different life with a different set of horrible adults to raise me. People say he was nice, and well-liked. He seemed like an okay guy. I'm no expert. Prior to a couple months ago, I last saw him when I was about two as he and the man he was handcuffed to were lead into prison. They both waved as they were led into the building. He'd been selling drugs. He was twenty and would be in and out of prison much of his adult life. The other guy was also young and probably has the same story. They smiled broadly in their orange jumpsuits as they waved. The sky was bright blue and the air was cold.
One of the last times I went home to visit Maui, I stayed at my grandma's house on Front St. She'd recently passed, but the house still smelled like her. My relationships with family have always been complicated--my stepdad actively hated me since day one, my mother was (on her best day) an unpredictable mess who liked telling people she didn't like me where I could hear it--but Barbara's house was always a safe space for the kids. She was a Hawaiian matriarch with the history of Maui displayed on her walls who put the parents on their best behavior. It was one of the few places where I could count on having regular meals and could just be a kid. Also, she had a massive library and I was a voracious reader. For awhile, we lived at her house. I finished 5th grade at Lahaina Elementary (later became King Kamehameha III) and spent most of 6th grade at Lahaina Intermediate before moving to Kihei (and then Kahului, and then, and then--the joke is that I spent at least 6 months at every elementary school on Maui).
Because the bus was crowded, I used to walk home from school every day--coming straight down Lahainaluna St and then walking down Front St. It was an hour long walk, give or take, in the hot, weird clothes my mother made me wear, but I loved every minute of it. I'd walk onto the property shouting "a hui hou!", have a snack, change clothes, and then take this big pool float out into the ocean for a couple hours (probably not smart, but nobody stopped me and I had a paddle).
I am grateful that I could take my wife and stepchild to this place and was given the opportunity to stay at tutu's with them one last time before the family did whatever they did with the property. I'm grateful that I could show them Lahaina and walk with them under the Banyan.
I'm not living inside this tragedy, seeing and smelling it every day, but I am grieving for the people who are. I am grieving for the people who are losing their people and who don’t know where people are yet. And I am grieving for the loss of place because the place itself is family. I think everyone who grew up inside Hawaiian culture feels this acutely.
Those of us who grew up pre-internet had parents who could frame themselves as wise and All-Knowing. A figure of authority just below the stature of God. But we live in an era in which it is remarkably easy to determine a person is full of shit (assuming basic-level research discipline) because we can fact check nearly anything within a few seconds.
Older people (my generation included) expected to have the mantle of elder wisdom passed to them along with the ability to basically say whatever the fuck bullshit and be treated like their imbecilic rambling=wisdom. But those of us who’ve been paying attention have observed that these are people who lie. A lot.
So we don’t respect them. It takes five seconds to fact check your Q-anon mom and, after a little while, you’re gonna get sick of her shit. And that’s when she starts posting weird memes about what an ungrateful asshole you are.
There are periodic assertions that "the left" is causing the problems in our country right now--homelessness, Democrats' ability to gain and maintain power, Trump's stint in the White House, etc.--but I can't find any evidence that the left has substantive access to the levers of power. They're not really "in charge" of anything. If they were, I wouldn't have read an MSNBC puff piece about how cool it is that some woman is paying 50% of her salary to live in a Seattle micro apartment this morning. At best some people further to the left have managed to move the Overton window a touch (or merely prevented it from sliding all the way right).
It sounds like a made up bogeyman to help people justify a slide toward accepting fascism in the name of comfort and protecting a shitty system in which they personally have thrived.
I think it's important for people who like to say they're into civil rights to remember that every great rights movement and every great leader in those movements always point at white moderates as the biggest obstacle preventing progressive change. Status quo isn't a solution, and neither is backsliding into some kind of police state. The left has solutions that require a serious buy-in, but would be effective. The opposition to the left only has to make sure shit doesn't work so everyone simply clamors for the paramilitary occupation force that is the US police system. Either way, you have clean streets, but only one of these models will get you one step closer to a Star Trek future in which all your needs are met and you can spend your time doing what interests you.
Mrs. Maisel is a sharply written, legitimately funny series that centers white feminism in a way that erases the overt and profound racism of the time. The whole last season I found it profoundly distracting that the show basically retconned the time period in a way that presents the lead character as somehow suffering equal (if not more) discriminatory obstacles as a wealthy white woman (Jewish, sure, but let's be realistic here--her skin is the color of 2% milk) than the Black people inexplicably occupying seats at fine dining establishments or breaking into their own showbusiness careers in pre-Civil Rights Act NYC. At one point we see Black women mildly wandering and laughing in the background of prep school alumni events with their Easter-lily-skinned cohort. (I don't recall such diversity in wealthy prep schools for girls as the norm before OR after Brown v. Board...)
On the one hand, I genuinely like seeing Black actors get jobs as something other than "maid" or "waiter" in a show like this but I am also aware that people in this country look at TV or movies as accurate representations of history, which makes this show a fairly egregious example of whitewashing history to make, I assume, a largely white feminist target audience feel more comfortable watching a show set in a more “overtly” racist time—before Lee Atwater introduced the strategy of using euphemisms like “fiscal responsibility” and “urban” to replace the N-word.
If the show were historically accurate, we would have seen a VERY different response to a Black family walking into a fine dining/private club in 1960 NYC to have dinner. Even Maisel herself would have stopped talking to stare coldly at the interlopers who dared enter her white space without first putting on a waiter uniform.
Taika Waititi recently talked about this in a speech during The Hollywood Reporter’s DEI panel event, which encapsulates the problem with Mrs. Maisel that made me squirm: diversity and representation as quota instead of as opportunity to be in charge. It was distracting to see the time period misrepresented in a way that only serves to make white people feel less racist or give them a pathway toward telling themselves things weren’t as bad as they were (and are). But there are parts where I think the show got it right and, hopefully, took their lead from people who’d know better. For example, Susie Meyerson's secretary, Dinah Rutlege, is a solid character who makes sense (harder working, a lot smarter and more valuable than the white women who applied for the job) as a fully fleshed out person who is believable in the context of the show. She comes off as actually navigating a fundamentally segregationist NYC in an effort to carve out a living and, once she’s established, uses her access to Susie to start promoting talent from within her community. I believe this character in a way that I don’t believe a 1960’s fine dining establishment with white waiters serving Black folks at a table while all the rich white people carry on like nothing is out of place. That kind of thing doesn’t even happen today. If it did, the word “Karen” wouldn’t be in our lexicon.
Conservatives, especially MAGA Republicans, talk a lot of shit about invading Mexico to "deal with the cartels" (who are only heavily armed because they can easily get military-grade weapons in Texas).
Today I learned that Mexico is one of the top ten Lithium-rich countries in the world and the resource is state owned with state owned and operated extraction companies.
Nothing makes the US want to go to war more than another country keeping its valuable resources out of the hands of US corporations—especially if there’s a whiff of socialism in the mix. Why else are we all up in Venezuela's business? Why are we still blockading Cuba (a pretty good example of a successful communist country, by the way, since they’re still holding on in spite of the US fucking up their shit for 61 years)?
Conspiracy theory: Republicans are basically pulling another Iraq invasion scam so they can get their hands on Mexico's lithium. IF they gain power in 2024, that's exactly what will happen--the US will invade Mexico under the pretense of stopping fentanyl and the cartels and—like magic—US mining corporations will seize control of lithium deposits and protect them with a bunch of murderous corporate mercenaries.
Encountered some "masculinity" content recently. Those alpha bros sure do like to keep the bar low for themselves.
Apparently:
"A real man knows how to [do task that you can easily find instructions for on YouTube and isn't actually that hard to do]."
OK. I notice that they never list anything useful that might happen more than a handful of times in a person's life on their list of things "men" do.
Also, why are all their measures for manhood only useful if we lived in a completely different world? Like, I'm over here in the 21st century while some podcaster with soft-ass hands is telling the little boys and emotionally stunted men making up their core audience that they need to have, at minimum, the same skills as a 18th century fur trapper and be ready for warfare at all times. Look outside, bro. The only people who get into fights a lot are people who go looking for fights to get into. "Be a sheathed sword" my ass. Be a decent human being who cries at Pixar movies.
I don't go in for conspiracy theories, but bear with me on this one regarding the wildly unpopular push to make abortion AND contraception (not to mention sex ed) illegal:
Adoption agencies are largely for profit and it can cost more than $50k to adopt a fresh baby.
Many, if not most, are associated with or run by some kind of religious organization.
The evangelicals are pushing hard to ban abortions in all cases.
A number of nations have cut the US off from adopting children out of their countries, usually citing corruption, human trafficking concerns.
There is a supply shortage. At a glance, I learned something like 2 million people are waitlisted for adoption in the US, which means--considering the potential cost of adoption--there is $100 billion sitting on the table.
Additionally: it's already established that foster care is basically where we send kids to get abused/wind up homeless, or worse, and there's already a trafficking option for people who end up deciding they don't want their adopted kid(s). So it's not like the infrastructure isn't already in place.
Unlike conspiracy theories, the stuff that ends up proven true share an important trait: the pieces of the pattern cannot be faked and the goalposts are never moved. I can take these easily found data and reasonably conclude that the anti-abortion movement is probably a front for a human trafficking ring for profit adoption agency backed by a big church. Why else do they always insist on adoption as the main alternative?
AlJazeera has a really good, short documentary highlighting a huge problem with white supremacy: Nazis appropriate and twist European ethnic heritages making it difficult to enjoy and celebrate our own cultural roots without everyone assuming you're into white supremacist shit. Want to wear a Thor's hammer? Great. But you have to be more openly anti-Nazi than anyone you've met because those dudes have culturally appropriated everything Norse a looooooooong time ago. It means being willing to do a lot of education and outreach work and a willingness to cause friction when dealing with the people who like to come to events to recruit future Nazis.
My takeaway is that those of us who have an interest in reconnecting with our ethnic/cultural roots (especially those of us in the US who've had those roots muddied or even erased by the white supremacist "melting pot") have to fight the hardest to keep the bastards out of our cultures. White supremacists treat every single European ethnic heritage event as a white pride rally because no one turns them away at the gate. I stopped going to things like the Highland Games for this reason--tell the organizers there's a guy walking around brandishing swastika tattoos and you're likely to get some bullshit about free speech at a private, ticketed event.
The thing is, white supremacists are a universally unliked bunch who like to hide out in groups who are willing to ignore them (for financial or other reasons) as a way to make it look like there are a helluva lot more of them than there are. Hanging out at the Highland Games or a medieval recreation event provides cover and recruitment opportunities. But ignoring them only makes us one of them. If the organizers of a big event ignore them, then that is tacit approval of the white supremacist ideology.
I like this doc because one of the things it addresses is the difference between the white supremacist myths and empirical historical reality and why those distinctions are important. It also talks about the strategies to use when dealing with someone on the "alt right" pipeline. I meet a lot of white dudes in my job who benefit from an actual conversation about what they think their problems are and how to address them but I don't hide my open hostility to white supremacist ideology and culture. Because as a "white" dude in the US who grew up in Hawai'i I can fully see that the white supremacists in our collective world history are directly responsible for the problems I experienced throughout my life.
I was watching some of Rosanne Barr's most recent stand up special, along with some other right wing/white grievance comedians and noticed that they're objectively not funny. Even the crowds don't seem to think they're funny, because nobody is actually laughing--they howl in approval. It goes kind of like this: (Comic) My pronouns are "kick your ass/AR 15/pledge of allegiance." (Audience) YEEAAAAHHHH!!! WOOOOOO! Kill 'em!!!! 'Merica!!!! Jesus is LOOOORRDDDD!!!!!
And just like that, I understand why I never thought most of the big stand up comics from the 80's were funny. So many of the bits, with the exception of smarter observational comics, were basically just some dude saying shitty things about people at the bottom of society while the audience howled its approval. This is especially evident with 80's comics who spent the entire decade telling the same exact jokes to sold out audiences at arenas. I mean, how many times can a motherfucker hear the same exact Andrew Dice Clay joke on an HBO special before they're not laughing (assuming they ever did in the first place)?
I don’t get it. Someone is going to have to explain these jokes to me.
If I could run schools to follow actual research conducted by real experts for what makes an effective learning environment:
Super spartan administration whose main job is to deal with the shitty public so teachers don't have to waste a bunch of time or do unnecessary emotional labor.
Administrators are never paid more than a teacher (nobody at the top of any of our systems does more important work than whoever does the primary labor—I’m not completely convinced any school actually needs a principal in the same way I know that no business on earth needs a CEO).
Facilities staff make living wages.
Class sizes that match current research on maximum class size for effective teaching on those subjects.
Teachers have academic freedom that can't be obstructed by religious goons with no background in education who take over school boards because teachers are the content experts who should have free reign to teach current material in their field.
Educators who live within walking distance of the school are given hiring priority.
A support team for each classroom (instead of a bloated top-down structure, the money and resources are placed where learning happens).
No cops on campus. "Security" should only be performed by people with a degree in education, because an educator’s goals aren’t the same as a cop’s goals (and cops really don’t have the background or training to interact with kids—especially in a middle or high school environment). Cops exist for social control, making arrests, and ruining the lives of whomever they don’t personally like. Educators are there to help people learn, which means kids need to make mistakes without going to jail.
Only students who live within a 20 minute walk are enrolled in the school if it’s in a city—none of that rich people driving their kids across town to enroll in higher performing schools business: you support your actual community or move to a different one.
Stop funding schools with property tax and replace funding with something that makes objective sense.
Lots of recess and breaks between classes that are long enough that students can amble to a locker before meandering to class instead of urgently rushing around while hauling all their shit in a bag.
Mimics college: no more than four academic classes per quarter.
Puts the focus on learning instead of enforcing weird behavioral norms—Who gives a shit if a kid wears a hat in the classroom? Nobody whose mind is on more important things.
I get a kick out of the threats coming out of the right about indicting prominent democrats in retaliation for Trump.
Fucking do it. If there's evidence for crimes, let's goooooo! Did Obama do war crimes? Send him to the Hague for trial. Got some prison-worthy dirt on Bernie? Throw away the fucking key.
Arresting people in power for doing crimes doesn't exactly "own the libs." By all means, make it easy as hell to arrest rich powerful people and put them away for crimes. That’s literally what the left wants—accountability.
I swear to god my little feelings will be so hurt I might cry.
Seriously, though, one has to wonder what it is about this modern version of conservatism that they seem to think everyone is pretty much the same and, over here on the left, we’re worshipping our leaders with the same deep fervor. Maybe it’s my autism, or maybe it’s the fact that I got into punk so early and took it seriously as an ethos (I vote both), but I find it personally impossible to be so impressed by someone in authority that they become my whole identity.
But that doesn’t stop the conservatives in my life from taking digs at moderate democrats as if I’m gonna lose my shit the way MAGA does. I like who I like because they have concrete policies that align with my values that are reality-based and can be summarized in a way that a 10 year old could easily understand. And, “like” is a strong word. If I say I liked Bernie, it’s not because I’m some cultist who calls himself a “Bernie bro” or think he’s a particularly effective legislator. I like how he moves the Overton window to the left, getting people to pause and think about how we should probably all be getting paid for our labor instead of making someone else rich. I dislike the right because they do fascist shit. Full stop.
Republican policies simply do not line up with my core values, though I do think it’s interesting how many people (not the politicians) who ID as republican or conservative basically have the same general values as me: fair pay for the work, time to spend with family, and the ability to go to a doctor without going bankrupt in the process. Of course, those are the conservatives who work for a living that have those values. Don’t get me started on the trust fund kids.
Since learning what I kind of already suspected—that I’m autistic (176 on the RAADS-R, with a highly developed masking strategy thanks to my horrifically traumatizing childhood), I had a little debate with myself about whether it would be good or useful to let my students know. One of the fears I had, of course, is that informing them would backfire somehow—they’d all drop the class and, with 0 enrollment, I’d lose my job. Ultimately, I decided to start letting students know—taking the announcement on a test run during summer class. Since the class was an intro to poetry writing course, I think I received a soft landing. Poets, the good ones anyway, are often neurodiverse and this small class was certainly a safe place to come out.
Since that experience didn’t send me running back behind the mask, I’ve chosen to be out about my autism in my more “academic” classes. Not just for the purpose of being open about my identity, but because knowing I’m autistic helped me see which of my “manifestations” of autistic behaviors are the ones students sometimes dislike. Also, reading the research about how hostile neurotypical people get towards masked autistic people (re: uncanny valley) vs. how they respond to people who are open about their autism only makes me more interested in transparency.
So how did it go? It’s still in process, but the short answer is that it’s going well for several key reasons. First and foremost, I am not struggling as much to earn my students’ trust as I normally do. I think this is a byproduct of transparency in general, but I detect a serious difference between earlier experiences and this one. More students, in general, are talking to me and asking questions about their work. In prior terms, it’s been hard to break through the (well earned) presupposition that the student-teacher relationship is naturally confrontational in nature. With few exceptions, I already feel like I am collaborating with my students instead of merely passing judgement on the efforts of strangers.
Second, and somewhat more important to me at this point, is the fact that I’ve basically opened the door to students with similar disabilities to share this important information and, if necessary, talk to me about how I can better support them. The best part of this part of the experience is connecting with people who are neurodiverse as a wider part of a community that being masked closes me off from and hearing from students themselves that being open about my own autism helps them feel less alienated in the classroom.
So far, being open has provided nothing but gifts. The part that makes me nervous is how consistently the research suggests I may run into hardship on the employment end of this transparency. There are strong suggestions in the literature I’m reading now against visibility in the workplace—especially in academics—because there are such a range of toxic stigmas against people with any kind of cognitive disability, and autism in particular. I’m an adjunct, like most college instructors, with incredibly fragile job security. What happens when I tell the department? What if I realize I’m not as “high functioning” as I thought and need some kind of accommodation to prevent the deep burnouts I experience?
Welp. I've got a few more days teaching a poetry workshop course and I am going to miss it. I modeled it heavily after the workshops I had with Primus St. John, which I always found profoundly supportive and accessible. Primus always gave feedback that highlighted what I'd call opportunities for the poem to grow whether that meant improving on what appears in the draft or using what was in the draft to build new poems (or a series of poems). He also never put his thumb on the scale or indicated he didn’t “like” the poem the way some other people do when teaching poetry classes. I never felt compelled to write poems I didn't like in his workshops, because he treats the work on the terms of the writer, letting the poet focus on their own interests and lead their own process. He’d do things like let you know how he read and understood the poem and ask the writer what they wanted the poem to accomplish and then provide feedback that matches the author’s goals.
I won't say I didn't learn strong lessons about craft elsewhere, but I used his approach in this class and have enjoyed fostering a supportive, kind environment in which people who started the term terrified of being ridiculed are now writing with skill and confidence. I let everyone find their own bar and many of the students reached a lot higher than they said they would on the first day. I honestly feel a sense of privilege that I’ve had access to the rough drafts of these poems and work with a group of people who were immediately on board with critique as support for one another’s work. I am astounded by a lot of the poems I’ve read in the last few weeks.
On another note: If you don't have Primus St. John's work on your bookshelf, your PNW poet collection is woefully incomplete.
"Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit:
There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect."
---Frank Wilhoit (not that one, the composer).
Also: "As the core proposition of conservatism is indefensible if stated baldly, it has always been surrounded by an elaborate backwash of pseudophilosophy, amounting over time to millions of pages. All such is axiomatically dishonest and undeserving of serious scrutiny. Today, the accelerating de-education of humanity has reached a point where the market for pseudophilosophy is vanishing; it is, as The Kids Say These Days, tl;dr . All that is left is the core proposition itself — backed up, no longer by misdirection and sophistry, but by violence.
So this tells us what anti-conservatism must be: the proposition that the law cannot protect anyone unless it binds everyone, and cannot bind anyone unless it protects everyone."
One of the most elegant political philosophies I've encountered thus far is a response to a blog post written by a composer whose main topic for writing is almost entirely on music theory. He happens to share the name with a poli-sci professor, which is why you'd have seen the quote miscredited if you'd seen it at all.
One of the things that becomes apparent quickly when talking with some people who have strong feelings about freedom is that they’re almost never truly concerned with actual civic freedom in any meaningful way. They aren’t interested in any of the things that make us free—the power to vote, to redress grievances, to organize against more powerful opposition in order to make the pursuit of happiness more likely for regular people. What they want is to live under the assumption that they have the right to make everyone else get out of the way so they, as an individual, can do whatever they like without any thought or obligation to the rest of the community. When it comes to things like rules or laws, they want the protections without the responsibility or obligations.
A good example of this phenomenon are dog owners who let their dogs off leash in places where leashes are expected and required. Responsible dog owners are familiar with this frustrating issue—especially when their own dog isn’t friendly to other animals and when we consider that the off leash people seldom have any real control over their pet. The person breaking the rule expects the people following the rule to make way and will get angry at the person whose dog is leashed when warned about the keeping the dogs separated. One gets the impression these off leash people are also the ones who either don’t clean up after their dog or leave bags of shit on the trail for someone else to clean.
We saw (see?) the same thing throughout the pandemic. The people who wanted to access essential services without feeling any obligation to the people required to face the public every day expected that they (a distinct minority in many cases) should be given the space to enact their antisocial tantrums while the rest of us remained silent, uncritical, and gave them the space to which they already feel entitled. The sheer number of public meltdowns followed by funeral GoFundMe pages or impassioned pleas to take the pandemic seriously by the same people who didn’t take COVID seriously after they ended up on a ventilator never seemed reach the folds of their friends’ entitled brains. People just kept melting down at Trader Joe’s like toddlers denied a toy.
After another mass shooting, this time on the same day the nation celebrates whatever we think of as freedom, we see the people whose identity requires they own AR platform rifles already freaking out at the idea that they may find themselves inconvenienced by the main thing the US gun violence issue requires: a consistent federal-level regulation. The rest of us are expected to make space for their unimpeded hobby based on remarkably ahistorical interpretations of the second amendment built more on faith than fact.
I started thinking about this last night as I saw 4th of July ordinance exploding in the skies around my home, each sky-burst, by legal standards, a felony. My phone started pinging with air quality alerts before 10 pm. We’d had kids over for a hot dog grill whose excitement about the fireworks was legitimately contagious, causing me to soften somewhat at the barrage. I was enjoying the show until someone launched a firework that exploded into a massive globe of sparks directly above my house. I watched as glowing cinders drifted onto my roof and felt hot debris pelting my skin. This brought me back to reality and the fact that my home—the first and probably only home I’d expect to own—might be the cost of a “freedom” this person didn’t actually possess. Unless we count this felony offense as ultimately unenforceable in a sky full of crimes. I thought about the effort we’d put into mitigating risk—staging fire extinguishers strategically for easy access. Soaking the yard in water. And then considered all the sneering online posts from “freedom lovers” making fun of combat veterans and pet owners who don’t have fun on fireworks days.
What these people, with their individualistic and selfish ideologies seem to share, is that they don’t value (or even know) what freedom really means and aren’t interested in protecting it. They don’t know the history of their freedoms or how many of them came at the cost of US civilian lives. This isn’t a crowd that cares about the steady stream of rights being gaveled to death in the Supreme Court. Especially the big ones: rights to vote, to have those votes counted, to representation, and equal rights under the law. They’re weirdly fine with giving oligarchs the ability to strip every citizen of power and don’t associate freedom with the responsibility of bequeathing expanded (and protected) freedoms to their descendants (along with a world in which to live in those freedoms). People who think of freedom as the right to do asshole behavior without any repercussions become easily manipulated single-issue voters who can’t see all their important freedoms walking out the door as they vote to keep themselves from inconvenience. (Assuming they use this freedom at all.)
Some people are fine with losing these freedoms as long as the people they don’t like are losing them more. These are the people who refer to democratically elected governments they don’t like as “dictatorships” and start plots to kidnap governors. Anyway, this is what I started thinking about as burning ash pelted my face and glowing embers landed on my roof.
The biggest reason I’ve started using this blog more often (just take a look at the date on the posts) is to explore whatever is on my mind at the time without being on a social media platform. I assume the most likely person to actually run across this website, which I’ve literally forgotten exists for a few years, would be a future student doing due diligence. I’d like that person to have the tools they need to make informed choices about whether to work with me, which is why my take on invalid ideas is worth making public. Some people aren’t interested in working with someone who’s not going to let people bullshit their way through a college composition course. Caveat emptor.
The reason I’ll never turn the comments on is because I don’t care what some random passersby to this blog might have to say. That and I’m pretty sure the bulk of the traffic to this site are bots trying to sell market analytics tools of questionable value—if my inbox is any indication. I interact with people in a bunch of different places. This just happens to be a place where I will somewhat publicly explore my own thoughts and, perhaps once in awhile, my brain will let me in on its secrets.
When someone in my life or one of my students says they think it’s valuable to look at “all sides” they never seem to mean it. First of all, this is something I’ll hear most frequently from someone who has (or is adopting) a right wing perspective and has been letting the YouTube algorithm choose content. Second of all, if pressed, the person will show they haven’t been engaged in anything resembling research discipline and most certainly haven’t been exploring “all sides.” What they usually mean by saying it’s important to consider “all sides” is that it is important that I (their current audience) accept the perspective of whoever’s in their YouTube feed at the moment when I already know the character in question is a gateway drug leading to khaki pants and Tiki torches or conspiracies about lizard people. It’s only a matter of time before they’ll accuse my tiny brain of being incapable of fully grasping the depth of conspiracy against (typically) white men. I’ve been called stupid a lot by people who are inexplicably incapable of producing a sliver of evidence for anything they say is true.
They’ll tell me to “do my own research,” as if I don’t already know exactly where they’re getting these ideas. As if having (and teaching) research discipline and showing people how to effectively (and honestly) argue legitimate perspectives I disagree with isn’t what I do for a living. What they want is their feelings validated. They’re like the person waving a Bible, making claims of truth about a book they never read. Truths often countered by actual experts on the text. They always seem to “know a guy” on the inside of every pertinent organization, which more than likely hints at the parasocial relationship they’ve built with a conspiracy theorist YouTuber. They present dogma and faith as fact and you can watch them concoct supporting “facts” out of thin air as the conversation continues. Ask how they know this stuff is true and they’ll change the topic. They’ve mastered the straw man and accuse everyone of using it.
Enablers—the people who like to smooth things over among family—will typically adopt a kind of neutral position, never challenging even the most absurd ideas or, possibly worse, claim there’s always some kind of happy medium between “both sides”—a center of pure truth wherever the disagreements meet. There’s a kind of rudimentary truth to this idea, but only in the sense that we can always negotiate the legitimately negotiable. The idea of a happy center in which truth can always be found doesn’t exist anywhere in which any one position is non-negotiable.
Non-negotiable arguments are often oversimplified, built of false premises, or focus on stripping people of their rights (and their lives). They are garbage. Negotiable arguments only exist after these garbage arguments are dismissed with prejudice. Worthy discussion recognizes real complexity, are self aware, and have the interesting trait of being just as potentially “right” as anyone else in the debate. These arguments are made by individuals who are capable of completely changing their minds when new information warrants it. Take the issue of climate change for example. Only idiots and grifters insist the existence of anthropogenic climate change is debatable. Cast them out of the discussion and what’s left are arguments about the best next steps for dealing with the situation.
I’m not necessarily counting shit perspectives that are “correct” on technical grounds. In the US there are some speech protections that mean people can say all kinds of cruel, bigoted garbage. If the argument is that a person has that right, they’re correct. But that’s never the argument, really. The argument is that people—especially people with stupid ideas—should have a consequence-free experience. That other people shouldn’t exercise their right to call a bigot a bigot or take other, punitive measures, like refuse to do business with bigots. The argument is that everyone should adopt the enabler role. Make nice. Let the racist uncle spout off at the holiday table unchecked. Protect the fragile emotions of the bigot so they never learn they’re a bad person. That’s the argument in this instance, which is just as garbage as denying ice caps are melting.
In the classroom, I illustrate the myth that all perspectives are equally valid by drawing a line on the board. On one side of the line, I write “Nazi” and ask the class what the core thesis is of the Nazi ideology. Here is where we encounter a little bit of the friction that happens when people’s minds start rubbing against the white supremacist ideology saturating US thought. Identifiable because I’ll sometimes get weird soft answers similar to the propaganda that the US Civil War had nothing to do with slavery. These are the people who’re ripe for or already participants of Holocaust denialism. Frequently enough, I get the right answer and don’t have to press. One of the core Nazi arguments, central to the entire thesis, is “Kill Jews.” Once we established that, I will write “Jewish People” on the other end of the line as the group with the biggest stake in this argument with the counter thesis “No thanks.” I’m sure it makes for a weird experience for anyone who wanders past the classroom and peeks into the window.
The next part of the exercise is to identify where in this argument a mutual truth might possibly exist. What is the “middle ground” at which both parties can walk away feeling like the answer is unsatisfying but fair to “both sides?” Obviously, if the argument is that one group of people simply shouldn’t exist, there is no middle ground. Certainly not for whomever is the target for such an argument.
The Nazi would (and still does) insist that we listen to “all sides” of the debate when they mean “my side.” As we saw with Nazis, and as we see with whatever they call themselves now (alt right, MAGA, or merely conservative depending on how reasonable they’re trying to appear), there’s never a valid perspective to the argument. Where is the middle ground when one side only seeks to end the other and “the other” is defined as anyone who doesn’t toe the line? Just look at how easy it is to find right wing politicians using death threats in campaign ads (and then claiming it’s a joke or that their a victim of the “woke mob” when the predictable backlash occurs). Also look at how easy it is to find people who aren’t exactly hiding their disturbing desire to murder political opposition.
So a question any of us could pose to someone who starts with that “all sides” comment is “are you, personally, listening to all sides?” Take that YouTube feed and weigh it against your opinion on trans people, for example. Are you listening to a content creator who’s actually trans? And I mean actually listening to their perspective, not showing up just to troll. Same thing with most of this type of argument. If someone who says “listen to all sides” about BLM, Women’s rights, LGBTQ equality, etc., without actually taking the time to listen to perspectives from people who actually come from these demographics, whatever they say has no real validity. They’re not offering a perspective, they just want their feelings validated. Take the police response to BLM—they bitch about having their feelings hurt instead of critically examining the difference between how policing works and how the people they allegedly serve want policing to work. They can’t take constructive criticism the same way an intro writing student can’t handle a comment about a confusing paragraph.
With that said, if a person is coming from outside the status quo on a lot of topics, they probably don’t have to do as much heavy lifting to understand their opponents’ perspectives. There’s a regressive, radical right that serves as the cudgel protecting what’s already in place that seems edgy or beholden to some kind of “uncomfortable truth” to an uncritical mind, but there’s nothing these figures protect that isn’t already familiar to everyone. Nobody is providing interesting insights on why capitalism is good, because we live within that system and see it every day to the point where some people think it’s a part of nature instead of a social construct. Black people don’t need to put any effort to learn white perspectives because everyone is steeped in the white point of view at nearly every turn. Just look at who’s on TV all the time. A trans person doesn’t need to understand the reason behind a transphobe’s rhetoric or “jokes.” Women grow up learning everything about men who are under no real obligation to understand the reality of a routine pelvic exam. Arguments by individuals in already protected and highly represented demographics are pointless if they’re not written by people who’ve legitimately considered views outside their experience. The trust fund kid people watch on FOX has never uttered a valid thing in his life. How could he? He knows almost nothing about the world in which the rest of us live.
It takes real work to legitimately see “all sides.” It takes self awareness and incredible discipline. It takes looking in the mirror and seeing exactly who we are and then making sure we spend actual time listening to people who don’t live in that mirror. Will we agree with everything they say? Maybe not. But we can’t have a valid opinion without at least trying to see points of view by people who aren’t us.
Take it from me, someone who looks like the status quo. The slim margin of validity in my perspective on anything is that I take extra effort to make sure I am in regular contact with perspectives from people whose lived experiences are something I can never fully understand. I’ve been wrong often. So much so that the only thing I assume anymore is that I’ll probably discover I’m wrong shortly after opening my big mouth. But one thing I know for certain is that any perspective a person can take that devalues human life or offers cruelty, humiliation, and violence as a solution has no real place at the table and it’s long past time to stop pretending otherwise. Another thing I’ve learned is that people who legitimately seem to review multiple perspectives consistently seem to view most issues as complex and nuanced. They may have a hard clear boundary where the millions of right answers stop and the wrong answers begin, and they may have a list of sources they’d suggest if you’re interested in knowing more about the perspective, but they don’t seem to market repackaged versions of the most horrific ideologies humans have encountered in the last few hundred years as part of an “all sides are equally valid” argument.
On the first day of “autism acceptance/awareness” month, I got a preliminary diagnosis for autism. When I described how it felt for me to do certain things, like go to the grocery store, my therapist perked up and started asking questions that perfectly described some of my daily routines. Then I took the RAADS-R test and scored 125 the first time, thought a bit more about what some of the confusing questions meant and scored 176 later, and 144 on the CAT-Q (which is real high). About a month and a half later, another therapist in the Kaiser Permanente system confirmed the diagnosis and autism went on my medical chart, where it will live forever.
It’s kind of a relief. Anyone who knows me well knows I had a really shitty childhood. It was getting exhausting trying to extract which moment(s) I needed to heal so that I could stop being so…out of sync. The torture of Sisyphus springs to mind.
What’s funny is that I’ve brought up the autism possibility a number of times over the years, but was told that I understand figurative language too well (which ignores that I have a graduate degree in understanding figurative language) and can “read” people. One, more problematic assessment, is that I have too much empathy for autism, which doesn’t line up with my experience of other people on the spectrum. Anecdotal, sure, but remarkably consistent at this point—at least enough to warrant inductive conclusions anyway.
Talking with the new therapist about the fact that I read danger or violence-escalating behaviors easily, we reached the conclusion that these are masks I’ve learned to wear in order to survive the hostile environment in which I was raised. As a weak, helpless child, you kind of need to know when the adults will beat you for whatever it is they hate about you when that’s the world in which you live. And, while I can read a poem and grasp its metaphors, I’m often surprised when people seem to “get” a half-formed thought with no clear context. Or the context and language doesn’t clearly support how the language is interpreted (or meant). Just yesterday, I got irritated with someone who apparently meant something quite different from what the language and context would imply. I was apparently expected to make the correct inference and now feel like I should probably apologize. It also drives me nuts when people say things that aren’t verifiably true, which is why I have so little patience for conspiracy theorists or antivaxxers and the like. Which is weird, because I’m cool with fiction or the “myth-making” language of poems—but god help you if you make a claim the data doesn’t support.
In any case, the diagnosis and everything I’ve learned about autism casts a very different light on pretty much everything. I can suddenly look back through my own history and see all the signs for this diagnosis were there. I read somewhere that getting this diagnosis often feels like rewatching a movie that has a surprise twist, only the second time you can see the foreshadowing. Nothing could be more accurate.