These women from the Standing Rock Indian Nation in North Dakota are only holding this Nazi flag up to the camera because they’re about to burn it, having captured it from public display on the property of a white supremacist in the nearby very small town of Leith, ND.
I see it all the time, both online and off – Person X writes/says something, Person Y says “gee, what you just said/did was kinda *ist” and Person X comes back with “how dare you call me a *ist” (or Person Z butts in with “how dare you call X a *ist”) .
But behaviour is never a fully accurate reflection of character. Bad habits we engage in unthinkingly don’t necessarily make us generally bad people or even generally thoughtless people, but this tends to be the reaction to having those bad habits challenged as marginalising behaviours – that the challenger is calling us a bad person.
The point is that this one particular act that is being criticised has problematic cultural assumptions embedded within it, and those problematic cultural assumptions are what need to be challenged.
I may have contributed to a new term for a rhetorical ploy we see more and more. Here’s how it happened – I’m rather proud of this coinage, but wonder whether we may be reinventing the fallacious wheel. Is there an already apt term in rhetorical jargon?
Game design consultant Ernest W. Adams at Butterflies and Wheels: It’s time for us to force the permanent nine-year-olds to grow up or get out of our games and forums.
Transphobic court tosses out rape charge because defendant’s intent ‘was to rape a woman’
A six year old in handcuffs. WTF?
It is depressing to have to point out, yet again, that there is a distinction between having the legal right to say something & having the moral right not to be held accountable for what you say.
If we use the intentions and feelings of privileged people to determine when bigotry occurs, you will find that no one is bigoted by that definition.
This is people saying what they really truly think – 700 Club on Why Atheists Should Hate Trees
So here’s some unnecessary and unkind rubbish in a new ad from Libra, a company selling tampons, pads and liners in New Zealand and Australia. Poking fun at trans women is very much not how to get the tampon-buying public on your side.
