Post called on account of mush brain. I need to catch up on my sleep a bit but the cats won’t let me.

Sparkly and I watched part of the Republican national convention today, which was amazingly weird. There was a big fuss about whether to approve some change to the convention’s bylaws. I don’t know what the change was or why people were opposed to it, but making a decision by voice vote of a whole stadium full of people does seem awfully imprecise.

Also the Trumps walked out onstage to “We Are the Champions”.

Mental filters

A while ago I saw a discussion among some autistic people on Tumblr, about dealing with slurs and other Things Not To Say when you have communication problems. This is a separate post because it’s not really related to the last one, this doesn’t have anything to do with my opinions about how slurs should be discussed. It’s just interesting to me as a point of comparison for my own communication problems are like.

Anyway.

One of the people on this post was describing how at one point they tried very hard to keep up with all sorts of Things Not To Say, until they realized that because they were trying to remember and weigh all these different things, it was costing them dramatically more effort to say anything. They decided they had to stop putting so much pressure on themself to say everything Correctly in order to save their overall communication abilities and spoon levels.

So, for me too, thinking about these things does take extra time and effort. There are some words I’ve been using/not-using for long enough that it’s a habit, but there are plenty of others where I initially phrase something one way, and then catch myself and think “No, wait, it’s disrespectful to use that word that way” or whatever. It’s a conscious thought process that takes time. Also sometimes there are situations where there is no obviously better way to say something, and that sucks.

But, it has never occurred to me to try to stop thinking about these things, because while the effort I spend on these things is not zero, it is completely negligible and irrelevant in comparison to the baseline amount of effort I put into wording anything I expect a lot of people to read. It does not make writing meaningfully harder for me. It is a few drops in a big bucket of just plain trying to express the ideas in my head clearly and concisely and in an order that makes sense.

When I do less-effort, less-polished writing, it’s usually the conciseness and the sequencing and the too-many-clauses sentences (and the hyphenated phrases like that one) that I let go of.

Logic

I sinultaneously care more and less about logic than you average… nerd who care about logic, IDK, I feel like there’s a recognizable set of traits there but I have no idea how to really delineate it. “Skeptic” might cover most of this group?

I don’t really care that much about logic in that:

  • I don’t subscribe to the logic/emotions opposed-binary thing
  • I don’t do the thing where you extend a radical amount of open-mindedness, in carefully netural language, to every possible argument, to show how logical you’re being
  • I don’t spend much time thinking about the idea of logic or consciously trying to be logical

I do care about logic in that I have a very methodical way of thinking through arguments, and I tend to feel like, if I’m going to bother thinking through something in that way, I should do it right and go down every single damn pathway. So when someone else sets out to be all logical and consider all the possibilities, I get kind of disappointed if they gloss over stuff. If you aren’t going to be really thorough, then say you’re limiting yourself to one aspect of the topic. Don’t try to cover everything and half-ass it.

Not that I expect anyone to change how they write because of me. I just get tired of thinking “but what about…?”

———–

I have this opinion because I have this “fault” too. I have a tendency to turn what could have been a focused essay about one aspect of a thing into a half-assed survey of the whole thing with one super-detailed section. It’s something I struggled with when I was younger & writing essays for school.

Thoughts on not-arguing

by which I mean, keeping a tense discussion from getting angrier, or making an argument less angry and more like a discussion.

These thoughts all basically boil down to “focus on the long term”.

  • Instead of talking about what you both have said, talk about what you meant/what you believe/what you are advocating for. Acknowledge that the specifics of what was said may have been unclear or misunderstood.
  • The question of whether what you’ve both said was said well or respectfully or in appropriate language is a separate question from the underlying issue the argument is about. Notice when you are moving from one to the other and consider which one you want to focus on.
  • What is the underlying issue anyway? Take a minute to think about it. What do you want the other person to say or do? What’s the most important point you’re arguing for? Talk about that.
  • Winning in the actual material sense of getting the other person to do what you wanted them to do, and “winning the argument” in the sense of stuff like making them upset, or saying something they can’t refute, are different things. Often they are mutually exclusive things. You may have to give up on feeling like you’ve Won An Argument in order to actually get what you want.

I had an almost-argument with someone on Tumblr today

and I was going to be like “See, this is how you de-escalate an argument!” but honestly they were shockingly nice and now I don’t feel like I can really take the credit.

I do wish I knew if they’d read my “about” page, just so I could have the full context. I’m guessing not, but if they did, they get +10 niceness poinst and 2 Confusion Tokens because I’m, like, three separate things they declare themself to be Anti on their own about page.

The reason we have the concept of a slur

(a racial slur, etc.)

is because we’re all still too scared to say that we are talking about feelings.

By starting from slur, by which we mean “a word you shouldn’t say”, we can go on and have all sorts of conversations about who can say it and when and why. We can make informational lists of words not to say. We can spread “this person said this word” like a warning, as if it conclusively tells us all we need to know about them.

With the word slur, we can do all that without discussing why it’s wrong to say those words. If we could discuss that, if we could talk about the impact slurs can have, then maybe there could be some actual nuance to those conversations about who can say them and when, but we can’t, because sooner or later the phrase hurt feelings would come up, and nobody dares say that.

A signifanct proportion of people– nice people, progressive people, people who care about oppression and justice and so forth– still find it hard to take seriously the idea of being concerned about whether they hurt people’s feelings. Even when they actually are concerned about it! It just can’t be said that way.

A slur is serious business. A slur is about oppression and social justice and academic theories. Hurt feelings sounds juvenile, trivial, weak, embarrassing.

The people who are most aware that hurt feelings are the real bedrock of the discussion– the people who’ve been hurt– are also understandably unlikely to discuss it. Nobody really enjoys saying “Words can hurt, words have hurt me, I am hurting”, because thinking and talking about your own weakness and vulnerability is hard. When you know that you’re likely to get reactions not only from people who don’t really want to hear about feelings, but from people who may actively sneer at the idea that your feelings about words count for anything, you’re even less likely to talk about it that way.

I’m writing this because I think conversations about slurs could gain some nuance from mentioning feelings more often, like I already said, but mostly I’m writing because I am juvenile and weak and trivial and embarrassing and I care about not hurting people’s feelings, with slurs or any other words, even people I don’t like, sometimes even people I hate, because it never accomplishes anything useful. And I don’t expect anyone else to feel the same way I do, and I certainly don’t think that Saying A Mean Thing makes someone a horrible person forever, but I do wish that caring about hurt feelings was considered a potentially tenable position instead of being inherently ridiculous.

This has been sitting half-written in my drafts for a bit, but today it goes out to the author of this post, and all the people who did not care about her feelings and chided her for caring about the feelings of men and boys.