moon_princess

moon_princess wrote

Honestly, I'm not involved enough in Trekkie culture to say anything definitively, but the criticism seems to hold from as far back as DS9 and some of its darker episodes. If I were to cynically overstep my own expertise on Trek fans, I would say that they want to believe that they already are members of a perfect, enlightened group; they think that they have already achieved, at least for themselves, the ideal of the Federation citizen.

They don't want to be confronted with the suggestion that anything needs to be changed, especially not with themselves of the fiction that they project themselves onto. Like you said of the colonizer/colonized dynamic, they want the problems to be the fault of other people, and for it to be up to them to solve.

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moon_princess wrote

Because it's not just "Stalin-praisers" that anarchists will call tankies. Someone once called me a tankie for saying that "The Interview" was shitty imperialist propaganda.

And anarchists often don't turn anti-authoritarian critiques on their own ideas. How many times have you seen a self-identified anarchist talking about getting rid of religion or shit like that?

If you want to actually engage with other ideas you need to do better than just saying everyone you don't like is authoritarian and leaving it at that.

I'm not even an ML but if you can't tell I'm sick of people throwing the word tankie around all the time too.

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moon_princess wrote

Reply to Pioneer by ________deleted

She only ran for president once.

Also, there have been a handful of women candidates who ran for president and did not win two times before Hilary; Jill Stein, Isabell Masters, Lenora Fulani, Belva Ann Lockwood.

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moon_princess wrote

Reply to comment by ziq in About “People of Color” by hentai

What terms do they use, and in what contexts? To me the "people of color" label seems to be, at least in part, a response to the nebulous nature of the terms race/racist/racism and an attempt to refocus the discourse specifically on white supremacy.

I don't see many people saying that various groups don't experience racism differently or that we should ignore the differences of various groups like the link suggests, it's just that the PoC label is supposed to reflexively illustrate that the common issue at hand is white supremacy, that anti-black racism and anti-asian racism and islamophobia (to name just a few ways white supremacy manifests itself) all spring from the same source.

No term is ever going to be perfect, nor will one ever remain static in its meaning; instead of finding the exact right word to use, I think it's more important to make sure we avoid ever becoming too reliant on specific, powerful words to the point that they supercede the importance of the message. Jargon shouldn't be the defining characteristic of a movement, and language is only ever a catch-all, a generalization, an over-simplification for the sake of expedience.

You shouldn't ever expect words alone to make what you mean clear; so while I'm sympathetic to the point of the OP link, that certain issues are being obscured, I don't think that's the fault of any specific term. It's easy to forget that the things we come to understand are the result of long, slow processes, and that we can't just dump the end-result on people (in the form of new language and new ideas) and expect them to understand exactly the same way we do right away.

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moon_princess wrote

I actually saw a nice breakdown of what different groups (Marxists, anarchists, and I think maybe the right) mean when they call other people liberals a few months ago, but for the life of me I haven't been able to dig the link up out of my browser history. It's a shame because I keep running across situations where I'd like to share it.

But I'm pretty sure the point is that because once upon a time anarchism was rooted in ideas of individual rights and personal autonomy, that makes it "liberal" in the eyes of Marxists. Like most Marxist critiques of anarchism, this is mostly just a parroting of some century-old argument that only applies to the shitty anarchists who are likewise trapped in the past (the kind who call themselves "libertarian socialists" and love Chomsky, usually).

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