Why do (esp white) men love having fights about politics where they change topics 6x to confuse you and then try and make you look dumb because you can’t jump between the points bc you’re too busy arguing the separate distinct points bc you thought that’s what the fight was about
“The Gish gallop allows a debater to hit their opponent with a rapid series of many specious arguments, half-truths and misrepresentations in a short space of time, which makes it impossible for the opponent to refute all of them within the format of a formal debate. In practice, each point raised by the “Gish galloper” takes considerably more time to refute or fact-check than it did to state in the first place,[4] which wastes the opponent’s time and can cast doubt about their debating ability in an audience unfamiliar with the technique, especially if no independent fact-checking is involved.[5] …If one is familiar with an opponent who is known to use the Gish gallop, the technique can be countered somewhat by preempting and refuting their commonly used arguments before they have the chance.[7]“
Or sometimes it could help to point out that they’re doing it, though I suspect the kind of person who does this is the kind of person who responds to “Wow, you’re Gish galloping” with “ad hominem!”
People who do this know they look like they’re winning to the audience. They make lots of short snappy inaccurate points and you’re fumbling to refute with full facts and explanations.
Like when I say ‘white people need to talk to bigots because bigots don’t listen to minorities’ I did not say ‘and it will be easy and fun’.
I know it’s easier to be like ~boo hooo the world is so evil and there’s nothing I can dooo~ but it’s statistically and experientially understood, just by fucking 3rd grade logic, that a bigot will be less amenable towards the subject of their bigotry.
Bigots don’t just ~not like~ minorities- they don’t think we’re human. It’s not about whether they agree with you or not in the moment. Like, pause.
Understand this:
Calls to action for white people to oppose bigotry are calls for white people to position themselves as opposition. THEY ARE NOT CALLS FOR ~SUCCESSFUL DEBATE~
Do not think you are expected nor are you likely to just go around arguing with bigots and they’ll go ‘I agree with you because you’re white!’.
Your job is to be sandpaper.
Every time they open their mouths to make a bigoted joke, or a bigoted remark, or post their shitty bigoted opinion online, you grate against them.
Your job is to make it hard to be a bigot or a fascist. Your job is to ostracize them. Your job is to speak over them the way they love to speak over minorities. Your job is to make it difficult, lonely, annoying, stressful and unwelcome to be a bigot.
When you are white and silent, You are making it easy. You are just letting it happen.
When minorities speak up for themselves, they are in danger, and the bigot just writes off our arguments as the chattering of ‘lessers’.
You, white people, whether you think so or not, are their peers.
Specifically those of you who look and talk like, to an outside observation, your average white american.
Bigots think you all think like them, but are too scared to say it. That, or you’re too much of a coward to stop them.
YOUR JOB IS TO PUSH BACK AND PROVE THEM WRONG.
YOUR JOB IS TO SEPARATE THEM FROM THEIR OWN COMMUNITY AT LARGE.
There are devils among you and if you want to stop being associated with them then fucking prove it. You’re pretty much the only people who can.
The thing with telling “cliche” stories, but with representation, is… these stories aren’t cliche for us.
Picture this. The people at the table next to you have been getting chocolate cake as a dessert for YEARS. After every meal, they get a chocolate cake. Now, it’s been years, and the people at that table can barely stand chocolate anymore. They want maybe a cheesecake. Or lemon mousse.
But your table? Has NEVER had chocolate cake. Mousse is also good, but you are SO hungry for that chocolate cake, cause you never had it before, and it’s brand new for you, and you’ve been watching the other table eat it for YEARS.
That’s what’s like getting a “cliche” story that’s representative. Has it been done a million times before? Yes. Has it ever been done for US? Well… no. Maybe it’s the 500th chocolate cake in existence, but all the other chocolate cakes weren’t meant for us (girls/PoC/queer folk/disabled folk/etc)
So it being cliche is not a bad thing. You may not want chocolate cake anymore. But we want our slice too.
Today’s another day when way too many people are saying this stuff happens in high school because that’s just how men are like, and if you add alcohol to the equation, whatever, what else can you expect?, and I’m suddenly thinking about Hockey Boy (my next door neighbour growing up), and a party we found ourselves at when we were seventeen and summer was almost there, enticing and sweet like ripening strawberries. I considered it a wild thing at the time, but I now understand we were innocent nobodies in the middle of an isolated nowhere. Still, there was music and spin the bottle and some very hard liquor and I think two people disappeared in a room together and everyone laughed and cheered. And anyway, Hockey Boy drank too much of whatever that thing was (‘Oven cleaner’, the host described it) and finally passed out on the couch, his freckles standing out like scars in the fading candlelight.
On the whole, a most interesting & satisfying night.
Only the next day I was made aware of a prank they were playing on him, and here it’s where it gets complicated for half a second: Hockey Boy and I were very good friends, but I was best friends with his best friend, Silver Earring, another boy who lived in the neighbourhood, and we’d all grown up together and spent time together and were in a band and did all those things teenagers did before the internet. What I never realized at the time is that Silver Earring had a tentative crush on me and what I did realize of is that I had a tentative crush on Hockey Boy because he’d basically put on thirty pounds of muscle over the previous summer and there’s a moment you get around friends of the opposite sex, right (or friends of the same sex for whomever’s so inclined) – that Shit, okay tHEN flash of realization that your childhood playmates have actual physical bodies attached to them, that they’re not only jokes and weird habits and shared memories but real people with bits and bobs and lips you could potentially kiss and wouldn’t that be a good story for your future children? And anyway, Silver Earring was trying to find out how I felt about him, also he needed to get back at Hockey Boy for some situation involving a guitar I never knew the full truth of, so what he did is that he told Hockey Boy that he’d been Very Inappropriate with me the night before, Very Inappropriate Indeed, and when asked for details he smiled a wild fox smile and dropped concepts like ‘nudity’ and ‘didn’t know you had it in you’ and also ‘not sure she’s happy btw’ and we were seventeen and idiotic, and this was all a big joke to him, time of his life, really, and when he came to me and asked me to lie and help him out so he could turn this prank into something Epic, I honestly didn’t see anything wrong with it?
(I now understand he was hoping I’d cry out, ‘Oh no, I couldn’t possibly pretend to have feelings for him’ and ‘I don’t want you, specifically, to think I’m interested in someone else’, but, well – miscommunication and missed chances and life taking us both in better and more suitable directions.)
No: we all knew one another really well and school was boring boring boring and people were always lying and going on adventures in my books, so this was exciting and new and something to write in my diary about. Yay. We both assumed Hockey Boy would be embarrassed, that he would blush that rare blush of his, and it was fun to have this stupid secret between us.
(As I said: yay.)
But when I got back from school that very same day, Hockey Boy was waiting for me in my driveway, all miserable and washed-out in the hot afternoon sun, and suddenly the thing didn’t seem so fun anymore. As soon as he saw me, as soon as I got off my bike, he stood up – he tried to look at me, couldn’t – and staring at his feet, he delivered a stumbling, heartfelt, soul-shattering apology for something I knew perfectly well he hadn’t even done. He told me he didn’t remember anything about that night, that he regretted drinking because he never wanted to embarrass or hurt me in any way, that Silver Earring hadn’t told him the details of what had happened but it didn’t matter – it was bad, and it was his fault, and he hoped we could still be friends but he understood if I –
“You fell asleep,” I blurted out, and I don’t think I’d ever been more ashamed of myself in my entire life. He was pale and red-eyed and freaking undone. “You fell asleep and nothing happened.”
“But he said – wait – that bastard -”
It ended, luckily, in nothing at all. Silver Earring paid us both drinks the next Saturday night, apologized profusely for being an idiot, and there was some blushing and a couple of uncomfortable smiles, but that was it. And if I think of my (boy) friends, of the people (men) I grew up with, stuff like this is mostly what I remember. Boys being careful, boys being kind, boys asking if you’re sure, boys backing off, boys saying sorry and looking at their feet and knowing exactly where the line is.
(Boys being normal, that is.
Boys being human beings and not freaks and not monsters.)
So, I don’t know – it physically hurts, it
physically
makes me sick to sit here and listen to grown-ass adults pretending boys and men are inherently violent, inherently brutal, inherently selfish and criminal and mean-spirited – and that we, as a society (as women) should simply let them be as violent and brutal and selfish and criminal and mean-spirited as they were born to be.
Seriously, enough with this bullshit.
Just – enough.
(And also: if men and boys are so utterly incapable of self-control, why do those same people insist of they should be in charge of virtually everything? You can’t both argue men are way more rational than hormone-driven, blood-dripping, borderline hysterical women and then explain away shitty and illegal behaviour as ‘just male nature’, surely? How does that work?)
honestly this will probably be a Controversial Post so Don’t @ Me but
you absolutely should be pro animal testing.
against cosmetic animal testing is one thing. to be honest, if we were in 1955, i’d say it’s still necessary, but we’ve kinda sussed out our options. we have a good database. only the weird experimental bullshit is worth animal testing in the field of cosmetics.
medical animal testing, though? if you come for medical animal testing, i will fight you.
yes i know the pictures look gory, and mean, and creepy. but this is still the primary way we learn.
only a fucking fool says that we know enough about biology to model it all on a computer. biology is one of those subjects where it can look like we know what we’re doing in that big picture high school view, but SURPRISE ASSHOLE! WE KNOW JACK FUCKING SHIT. we just discovered a new organ, like, a couple years ago. there are layers of immune system so involved that we know humans probably have them but we just don’t fucking know how to spot it. and if you can’t spot it, if you can’t describe its behavior – how the fuck do you computer model it?
so what do you do? you use test animals as analogues. a lot of test animals are used because we want to study something, but we need it simpler, and more easy to spot. shoutout to fruit flies and zebrafish! and then there are some test animals where we want to see what it might look like in a complex critter with a lot of moving parts similar to ours – like mice.
in a perfect world, we wouldn’t have to do any animal testing. let me get this straight: i know that animals suffer and die so we can test on them. i know that. but even as i mourn them, i thank them.
we still need animal testing in medical science the same way a general needs foot soldiers. in a perfect world, there would be no war. but there is war yet to fight.
be grateful. be compassionate. fight for strict ethical standards. (for one fucking thing, bad ethics means bad fucking science, because you’re introducing additional variables into the mix and not being honest about balancing for them!) remember every single animal from chimpanzee down to fruitfly as a brave soul who gave their life for a greater cause.
but the cause is still great.
honor the sacrifice of these animals by supporting research, not seeking to make their deaths be in vain by saying you do not want the foundation of knowledge they gave us to be built upon any longer. they gave us a precious gift of knowledge for their lives already. it is not kind nor ethical to spurn that gift, because the war isn’t over, and the battles are not yet won.
remember these animals as brave soldiers. honor them. be proud of them. seek that those still in the fight are treated humanely. hell, make memorials! there is a lovely memorial in poland iirc dedicated to all the knockout mice that have helped us understand genetics, and it’s one of my favourite monuments in the entire world.
…but don’t disrespect their sacrifice.
(and if you need to care, on a more practical level, about the medical animal testing that looks ickiest to you because it’s cute doggies and kitties? ….where the fuck do you think new veterinary medicines come from, shat out by cherubim upon our heads? knowing that a medicine works for x illness in dogs isn’t just a stepping stone to human test trials, WE NOW HAVE A MEDICINE FOR DOGS TOO.)
it was unveiled in 2013, and is in Novosibirsk at their institute of genetics (same people that still are running the SibFox experiment)
i think we need more monuments like this. i would like to see one in every college that has a genetics department. thanking not only mice, but all laboratory animals.
seriously though whenever i’ve brought it up to people who are against medical testing on animals, there’s about 95% odds that they go “oh we can just test people who are in jail and on death row instead!!!”.
and then i always have a moment of being quietly exhausted at them. i feel like it’s a bad sign when my white as wonderbread ass has a moment of “oh god help you, i dunno if i have the strength to explain to you right now about racial problems”. it’s so above and beyond that when i think somebody is being too white, like when they complain about salt being too spicy and mayonnaise being exotic, like, they’re deep in the shit indeed
Imma toot my own horn and post a link to the poem I wrote about this.
I really love the OP, I really appreciate their reflections on the nuances of the issue. I really admire @vmohlere ‘s poem, it’s a really nice piece of craft. I really love @honoriaw‘s addition.
this is giving me so many good feelings about a nuanced, heavy, difficult topic. I’m so glad we could share them. This is such a hopeful and thoughtful approach.
‘straight men are terrified of showing platonic affection for other men because they’re afraid people will assume they’re gay’ now i hope this doesn’t sound too harsh but maybe if straight dudes, as a group, hadn’t spent decades
vilifying, mocking, and murdering gay men at every opportunity maybe being mistaken for a queer wouldn’t be such a federal fucking issue
like i am sincerely sorry men can’t show affection for other men without fearing for their safety and social standing, but mayhaps instead of blaming fangirls on the internet we could try asking straight dudes to step up and address their blatant homophobia
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