{"id":29816,"date":"2016-05-18T01:00:14","date_gmt":"2016-05-18T05:00:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=29816"},"modified":"2018-09-18T15:23:25","modified_gmt":"2018-09-18T19:23:25","slug":"qotd-when-emotional-abuse-is-your-means-to-an-end","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2016\/05\/18\/qotd-when-emotional-abuse-is-your-means-to-an-end\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: When emotional abuse is your means to an end"},"content":{"rendered":"

Whenever I see screaming, hate-filled behavior like hers the important part never turns out to be whatever principles the screamer claims to be advocating. Those are just window-dressing for the bullying, the dominance games, and the rage.<\/p>\n

You cannot ameliorate the behavior of people like that by accepting their premises and arguing within them; they\u2019ll just pocket your concessions and attack again, seeking increasingly abject submission. In one-on-one relationships this is called \u201cemotional abuse\u201d, and like abusers they are all about control of you while claiming to be about anything but.<\/p>\n

Third-wave feminism, \u201csocial justice\u201d and \u201canti-racism\u201d are rotten with this. Some of the principles, considered in isolation, would be noble; but they don\u2019t stay noble in the minds of a rage mob.<\/p>\n

The good news is that, like emotional abusers, they only have the power over you that you allow them. Liberation begins with recognizing the abuse for what it is. It continues by entirely rejecting their attempts at manipulation<\/em>. This means rejecting their terminology, their core concepts, their framing, and their attempts to jam you into a \u201cvictim\u201d or \u201coppressor\u201d identity that denies your lived experience.<\/p>\n

The identity-jamming part maradydd clearly gets; the most eloquent sections of her writing are those in which she (rightly) rejects feminist attempts to jam her into a victim identity. But I don\u2019t think she quite gets how thoroughly you have to reject the rest of the SJW pitch in order not to enable their abuse.<\/p>\n

This is why, for example, I basically disengage from anyone who uses the phrase \u201cwhite privilege\u201d or the term \u201cpatriarchy\u201d. There is a possible world in which these might be useful terms of discussion, but if that were ever our universe it has long since ceased to be. Now what they mean is \u201cI am about to attempt to bully you into submission using kafkatraps<\/a> and your own sense of decency as a club\u201d.<\/p>\n

Eric S. Raymond, “Meredith Patterson’s valiant effort is probably doomed”, Armed and Dangerous<\/em><\/a>, 2015-01-19.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Whenever I see screaming, hate-filled behavior like hers the important part never turns out to be whatever principles the screamer claims to be advocating. Those are just window-dressing for the bullying, the dominance games, and the rage. You cannot ameliorate the behavior of people like that by accepting their premises and arguing within them; they\u2019ll […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[28,53,41,15],"tags":[262,1235,987,129,99,997],"class_list":["post-29816","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media","category-politics","category-quotations","category-technology","tag-culture","tag-esr","tag-feminism","tag-hack","tag-racism","tag-socialjustice"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-7KU","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29816","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29816"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29816\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29817,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29816\/revisions\/29817"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29816"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29816"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29816"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}