Rule #2 is possibly our most important one:
Be respectful. Everyone should feel welcome here.
Learn to disagree without being rude or disrespectful.
It can be difficult sometimes, since western social media thrives on collective outrage, and they knowingly ingrain this into us for years. But please do adhere to this rule, and it will make this place much more enjoyable.
We will not hesitate to issue temp bans (usually a day or two) for those who make everyone’s experience unpleasant.Hit the report button if you see this behavior.
Thanks!
Apologies if this is something that you think should be obvious to anyone, but I’m genuinely curious what you mean by “classist” here.
I occasionally encounter assholes from all walks of life and prefer to avoid them all the same. I’m actively in favor of reasonable moderation on social media sites to filter assholes out because it’s better for my mental health.
Nobody’s saying we can’t have differences of opinion and disagreements. But I don’t think it’s unreasonable that we should be expected to engage respectfully or not at all. This is a standard that should be applied equally to all. It’s difficult to do, but we should also strive to hold people we otherwise generally agree with on principle accountable if they’re being aggressive/hostile/antagonistic because, at best, they’re being a bad advocate of our own positions and, at worst, they’re being an asshole.
Alright I’ll bite.
As you move down the wealth ladder you eventually reach a point at which there is a culture change. There are significant differences in the culture of the average middle-income anglo with guilt about their privilege compared to the people who are really, genuinely struggling. Once you cross a certain threshold, I’ll call it the poverty threshold for the sake of this reply but it’s not really a strict line but more of a broadly intersecting spectrum where there are many people who can blend into both groups, you reach a behavioural change point. This behavioural change, both in speech and in attitudes, is generally driven by those of us below a certain income level genuinely not giving a single fuck about how someone speaks but rather what they are saying.
Take for example my home of Liverpool. If I go down the council flats I’ll find myself hundreds of people who will speak in ways that the middle-income liberals of america would find abhorrent. They will cuss you for a minor thing that makes it seem like you just killed their dog. This is normalised culture for them, and among their peers it is perfectly fine behaviour - but to the sheltered middle income person who sees it as an overreaction? It’s shocking, and they don’t like it.
This trend occurs towards the lower income groups because frankly their is less and less incentive to ruin relationships with people over social policing. Far more is put up with and accepted because everyone’s got it rough and nobody’s interested in making someone’s life harder by getting overly emotional about a few swearsies.
I fit into one of the blending people, seamlessly transitioning between the two and speaking both ways. I grew up in squats, but I also got a very fortunate break that led to me getting an education in what many would regard as the ruling class side of our education system, which is split between schools for the workers vs schools for the bourgeoisie.
Anyway. The point is that the tone policing has the effect of shutting out these people from participation. The reason you don’t see the majority of these people in participation online isn’t because they don’t have access, it’s because they’ve had the experience of getting banned everywhere for not speaking like a cultured middle income liberal, and they’ve frankly got bigger priorities in their lives than learning how to speak like the people they fucking despise.
It is classism because it explicitly shuts out this class of people from participation. Almost everywhere online the tone policing functions as a tool of class discrimination that bends internet culture towards privileged middle-income groups over the poor. It’s not explicitly intended to do this, but it is the outcome of it. Much like for example having a “no hoodies” rule in a shop doesn’t function to keep out middle-income people but keeps out the “chavs”, if you’ll forgive my use of a classist slur for effect.
You wanna get aggressive and go at it? Go ahead. Do it. How something is expressed is not important compared to what is actually being said. The issue with this form of classism is that a section of society goes completely unrepresented online because of it, people whose politics almost always align with my own socialist views once they’re well educated in what their interests are.
Thank you for responding thoughtfully and giving me things to consider I hadn’t thought about much previously.
This seems like a tricky problem to me because, while I understand that there are inherent issues with deplatforming people who are simply edgier and more coarse in their dialog, whether it’s due to their culture, socioeconomic status, or otherwise, I also feel like I have a right not to tolerate undue abuse in my online discourse. You mention your own ability to context switch with your use of language and I understand and appreciate that’s a luxury and ability many people don’t have in life. I guess I don’t really see a great solution to the problem you’ve described other than flattening wealth inequality and getting people to mingle more amongst cultures starting at a young age.
As far as dealing with adults goes right now, though, I’m willing to have conversations with anyone who will genuinely consider my viewpoint and express why they agree or disagree rather than simply attack my character and offer nothing of substance. I’ll engage even if they come back in a more hostile tone than I’d normally appreciate. You have not attacked my character and you’ve replied thoughtfully, so this exchange has been productive (at least for me) 🙂
Circling back to some of my previous thoughts, I think regardless of culture/class one general problem I see is that when we talk amongst our various in-groups, we don’t have a direct contrarian viewpoint to challenge. This lets us get lazy in our internal discussions, accept as fact the ideas others would challenge, leave unexplained the concepts that our in-group just tends to know already, and worst of all vilify dissenting viewpoints to a dehumanizing extent. I see it in all groups, but specifically I see it first hand in liberal groups I’m in and I realize that it can be seductive to talk about conservativism (for example) as simply evil. Hell, I often see fellow liberals tearing apart their own if someone doesn’t live up to a 100% purity standard they’ve created.
When I start hearing my liberal in-groups parrot such talking points, I take a step back and remind myself this is emotional, not rational, discourse and is not a productive way to discuss sociopolitical issues with others. Unfortunately, I don’t think enough people do this, so we ultimately get shouting matches when different ideologies bump into each other. Thus, my impassioned plea is that we all try to moderate ourselves and our own in-groups to the extent we are able. We can downvote people we might otherwise agree with if they’re being assholes, for example. It will make intersectional dialog more enjoyable for everyone.
Liberal groups are squeezed because the middle is disappearing under the steadily tightening contradictions. You only have to walk the streets for a day or two to see the results of liberalism, certainly it has created great productivity but the production is not going to the majority of people. When the soviet union fell the liberal ruling class (which I include conservatives in, they are two halves of liberalism, the political ideology of capitalism) went into overdrive taking away every single benefit given to the people in pursuit of competition with a real threat that sought to improve people’s standard of living worldwide.
As such, liberals are radicalising in much the same way that many pushed to the left (communists/anarchists under the umbrella of socialism) are and as much as many pushed to the fascist right are. It was the liberals in the SDP that killed Rosa Luxembourg to prevent the would-have-been sparticist German revolution which then probably led to the nazis taking power, liberals aren’t incapable of being “extremist” in their own sense. As they get threatened more and more between the rising far left and the rising far right they themselves become just as radical about maintaining the status quo, this in turn causes them to shut us socialists out of their spaces. And why do they do that? Because they really don’t want people like you talking to people like me, because when people like you talk to people like me you come away from the interaction just a little bit more red than you were yesterday. They see that happening everywhere, and the only method they have to deal with it is to prevent the mixing of groups.
This is precisely when someone sometimes needs a verbal slap. One of the only tools we have for moving people in the online space is creating discomfort, and if creating discomfort in someone over the way one interaction occurs brings them towards behaving differently in a future interaction then it is a valid and useful tool to have available. Some people need a dressing down before they open up. Some people do not.
I disagree. Reading content online is inherently different from listening to someone speaking out loud. Internet discourse must be different in order for us to better understand each other. Tone and emotion do not come off well in text posts so we adjust our way of communicating accordingly.
I don’t know why I bother though, you clearly have a problem with a large portion of society that has done nothing to harm you. The average person is not out to get you. Your anger at the middle class is exactly what the super rich want.
Disagree. I don’t give a shit.
Yeah sure thing, except exploit the fuck out of people, enslave everyone, commit mass genocide and destroy the planet. Done absolutely NOTHING to harm me my ass.
The middle class are aspiring bourgeoisie, there’s a reason they’re officially called the petit-bourgeoisie. This is not a conversation about the middle-class, it is a conversation about middle-income people, which are two entirely different things.
There is zero value in having a conversation with anyone that names themselves chromosome though, definitely a totally normal name to choose.
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Can you define tankie for me? The definition seems to change every time I talk to someone saying it. Right now all you know about me is that I read Lenin? Is reading Lenin supposed to be a bad thing?