Yo, social justice bloggers.
Reblogged from all-natural-gropius
Maybe, juuust maybe, the reason people hate your guts isn’t solely because of your race/gender/orientation/etc, but because you are constantly going on about abuse and trigger warnings while telling people to ‘kill themselves’ and ‘die in a fire.’ Just a thought.
Things I’ve actually seen in posts:
- Black bloggers ordering white people to shut the fuck up and “listen” while claiming that those same white people sharing their opinions are “silencing” them.
- Demanding that no one judge anyone by the colour of their skin, while claiming that white people’s opinions on racism are automatically worthless because of the color of their skin (and nothing else).
- Vigorously defending the right of all people to choose who they love for whatever reason, while denouncing those whose preferences lie away from LGBT people as “small-minded” or “oppressive”.
- Claiming that Native Americans are facing all sorts of racist and structuralist problems today while only ever complaining (or at least whining the loudest) about white girls wearing those feather hats.
- Defending the rights of free speech for everyone while almost violently pushing to eliminate certain words from the public discourse.
And so on. George Orwell had a term for this curious ability to keep mutually exclusive ideas in your head at the same time without falling over: doublethink. When psychologists eventually caught up with him, they called it cognitive dissonance, which if exposed can cause “surprise, dread, guilt, anger, or embarrassment”.
On tumblr, these feelings most frequently manifest in a stream of violent language, personal abuse, name-calling and so on, but never anything in the way of a sensible counter argument. A quick look through PostSatire’s posts will demonstrate what I mean.
If the poster has completely disappeared down the rabbit hole, it doesn’t result in empty, unpleasant language so much as a simple denial, again with nothing at all to back it up: “That’s not what I said,” when it clearly was, or “you’re twisting my words/taking them out of context,” when I’m clearly not, it’s all good stuff. This sort of defense is especially stupid in a medium like tumblr where anyone can just check back for themselves.
When I see a post like “I’m all in favor of free speech, but you should never say X Y or Z,” the sound of irony crashing around the poster is deafening.
But then again, this blog would be nothing without it. If you see these kinds of posts, and you’d like to see me rip them apart or just make fun of them, please let me know. That’s what PostSatire is for.
