pease the unappeased...
Hey y'all,
I think this is my first actual hell call. And it's inspired by an Epiphanies thread. As the kids say: WTF.
Congratulations, @pease , you caught the repressed little white boy just as he was breaking a lifelong habit of dissociating, you went and pricked him when he was in his feelings.
Lucky you...
Guys, I don't like doing this. I don't have the fucking time. I got three kids. I got a job taking care of disabled folks. I'm fucking sensitive. I'm middle aged and going through a defrag of my head. I've had fucking ICE going through my fucking ethnically diverse fucking neighborhood in fucking Chicago. I've watched my employer struggle to get enough people to show up for work because of the fucking situation our federal government is in. I take a lot of this stuff personally. I don't just have black friends. I have multiracial immigrant friends and dammit, I get along with them better than I get along with preppy-ass wannabe armchair leftists like pease.
Yes, jackass. I know who Sally Hemings is. But lifting up the raped body of a black woman was not something I needed to do in that conversation to prove my "woke" white boy bona fides, because I outgrew that shell a long time ago.
And I don't think white folks have any fucking business using the word "woke," it either sounds sanctimonious or snide. Those scare quotes are made of reinforced rebar. Leave it for black folks who've earned it. I'll be happy to call myself an honest hick. That's not real either, but it carries more integrity because least it's where I grew up.
Fuck off with your passive aggressive accusations of racism. Fuck off with your moral perfectionism,. And kindly fuck off with the insinuation that I'm not good enough for your principled self righteous ass.
There are few things in my life as embarrassing as an educated fool trying to prove to the world that he's going to save them from institutional racism with his refined moral perfectionism.
....
And let it be known that I am authentically tired, distracted, and cannot promise that I'll circle back and follow this garbage dump. But I probably will. I don't like hurting people. But pease, you're pissing me off. If you are as kind as you think you are, kindly back off, please. I do not enjoy this.
I think this is my first actual hell call. And it's inspired by an Epiphanies thread. As the kids say: WTF.
Congratulations, @pease , you caught the repressed little white boy just as he was breaking a lifelong habit of dissociating, you went and pricked him when he was in his feelings.
Lucky you...
Guys, I don't like doing this. I don't have the fucking time. I got three kids. I got a job taking care of disabled folks. I'm fucking sensitive. I'm middle aged and going through a defrag of my head. I've had fucking ICE going through my fucking ethnically diverse fucking neighborhood in fucking Chicago. I've watched my employer struggle to get enough people to show up for work because of the fucking situation our federal government is in. I take a lot of this stuff personally. I don't just have black friends. I have multiracial immigrant friends and dammit, I get along with them better than I get along with preppy-ass wannabe armchair leftists like pease.
Yes, jackass. I know who Sally Hemings is. But lifting up the raped body of a black woman was not something I needed to do in that conversation to prove my "woke" white boy bona fides, because I outgrew that shell a long time ago.
And I don't think white folks have any fucking business using the word "woke," it either sounds sanctimonious or snide. Those scare quotes are made of reinforced rebar. Leave it for black folks who've earned it. I'll be happy to call myself an honest hick. That's not real either, but it carries more integrity because least it's where I grew up.
Fuck off with your passive aggressive accusations of racism. Fuck off with your moral perfectionism,. And kindly fuck off with the insinuation that I'm not good enough for your principled self righteous ass.
There are few things in my life as embarrassing as an educated fool trying to prove to the world that he's going to save them from institutional racism with his refined moral perfectionism.
....
And let it be known that I am authentically tired, distracted, and cannot promise that I'll circle back and follow this garbage dump. But I probably will. I don't like hurting people. But pease, you're pissing me off. If you are as kind as you think you are, kindly back off, please. I do not enjoy this.
Comments
Love to you. Hard stuff.
Yes - a good way of putting it.
Thanks for acknowledging that that was a kick. I'm up again.
And yeah, integration is something I'm good at, appreciated, though it probably explains why I'm also hard for some folks to comprehend. Their loss. Hence, the "hick." That's the hick experience. I'm very much in my own context. Communicating with other people is always a challenge. But here I am.
I think there's something about the way white people seem to talk so self-righteously about black trauma that annoys me. I ain't black, you* ain't black. If we both start talking about black trauma...this becomes a question of tactful appropriation and clearly we're operating under some wildly different ethical standards. It is a tricky business.
I don't presume authority. I don't accept yours. Kindly, don't presume to boss me around without the word host attached to your handle. I'll happily engage you but I don't appreciate the attitude.
* Unless I'm seriously mistaken here.
You're not going to get clarity from me when I'm that angry.
What's clear is that, being angry, I was reducing both myself and my target to caricatures to blow off frustration with the way we are both presenting ourselves in an online discussion board.
If I reduced @pease to a caricature while retaining my own humanity, that would be rather unsporting of me, no? I know we don't all know or show our full selves here. It's social performance. I'm just being rather transparent about it.
I think "hick" has become one of my ways of simplifying myself for the sake of a fight. In truth, I'm not that much more of a hick than anyone else is. Though in an existential way I think we might all be hicks with our own hollers to defend. Some of us just have bigger hollers than others. I didn't grow up in a holler, but I know what the word means and I think the concept has merit.
If that word isn't sophisticated enough for you, call it a Sitz im Leben. A hick is simply a human, taken as themself, a product of their own particular context.
[...]
Thankfully, if I read him clearly, @pease seems sympathetic and therefore this has been a very short thread, unless anyone else has any similar grievances to express.
If our difficulty persists and my irritation rises, I may come back to this but I am, for the time being, appeased.
If anyone wants to accuse me of being incomprehensible in this post, do me me favor and ask me clarifying questions. Better yet, we can have a lovely Purg thread about "WTF Bullfrog is going on about?" Call me to Purgatory! If I have the time, I can try to be pithy.
Though a cautionary note: I might enjoy the experience.
It's a spiritual malaise because we have lost our spiritual roots and cultural identity. It makes us feel better about ourselves.
Really? 'Cause it sounds like what any decent person does: let others know when they're being shitty. I mean, you can argue from a mote/logs point of view that they should back off, but presumably that applies equally to your claims.
Say what you will about old-fashioned imperialists but they did at least try to dress up imperialism in some sort of concern for minorities and some of them I'm sure convinced themselves that was what they were doing.
The cynicism and nihilism of your post - the idea that standing up to defend other people is a spiritual malaise - is new.
As a pertinent example, naming victims alongside offenders. If one was to dress up "naming victims" as a moral good, one is ignoring a lot of things, not least in the present moment where victims of Epstein are taking great offense that the system has named them.
There are other things to say about this that are hard to articulate, but there appears to be a form of moral oneupmanship going on.
The difference between paternalism and allyship.
It is but it is also more complex than that. I do not think I can be an ally of a slave from the 1820s, slaves in general in any era or victims of the Holocaust.
As we all know, millions suffered and died. We absolutely do need to keep that in mind when discussing anything to do with the Holocaust.
I regularly read stories of the victims, I assume most other people also see them and are affected by them.
But I'm not an ally. Nothing I can say or do here will ever change what happened.
This obviously rhetorical sweeping statements would appear to me to demean victims. That sentiment I agree with.
That seems quite quaint in the 2026 when things really are going on that have resonance with 1930s Germany.
Secondly, I don't think discussing the character of evil in a Nazi leader is doing that.
I get that very much, now you mention it. Someone from my past would have gone down for a long stretch if he were still alive to face charges, and I would be one of his victims (yes, I'm quite OK, stone-cold sober, typing this in work in a quiet moment, and actually probably prefer to mention this here in Hell rather than say in Epiphanies. I have nothing to discuss about it). From my perspective, I would be OK with someone using that man to illustrate some angle of law or the failure of 1970s child protection provisions. But they could FRO if they wanted to include my name in that discussion, and FRO again if they wanted right-on brownie points for doing so.
That I hadn't linked this personal experience with that being endured by Epstein's victims already, is just evidence of a rather depressing failure of empathy on my part.
I assume the OP had other matters on their mind than your entertainment. What's your excuse?
But the context for this thread (and elsewhere) are dead victims of "great men" of history, victims whose names have been put into the public domain, typically by their relatives and descendants and those who share their identity.
In the case of survivors of abuse, I don't think it's controversial to say there are many who want to be listened to, who want to tell their stories themselves. As well as those who don't, as the case may be. Having agency means having control over your own life, and your own story, and not having your personal details carelessly disseminated online by "the system".
Alongside "victim" and "survivor", it grates that perpetrators are invariably named. Maybe they could be replaced by 3 words: echo.camel.trellis
Defending people who are different from you is not any kind of spiritual malaise. People, of whatever race or culture, are formed in God's image. They are my neighbors. They are all equally worthy of my care and support.
It is absolutely the job of anyone who has some amount of power in some scenario to use that power to defend the people in the room who have less power. If you're a fairly senior person in a meeting, and another senior person speaks offensively or in a belittling manner towards a more junior person, it is your job to step up and shut that down.
Given the general trends in our society, the senior person is more likely to be whiter and more male than the junior person, but it's the power differential that's important.
Dafyd Hell Host
First we're told to use our privilege to help the historically unprivileged. Then we're told that any attempt to do so is paternalistic. Which is it?
Who exactly are you trying to badly psychoanalyze here?
Because if it's me, I'll be happy to turn this back into a proper hell thread.
Who told you that any attempt is paternalistic? That's weird.
Somewhere in the Southern Ocean between South America and Antarctica?
Yes, they're named. When we talk about the bad shit people have done, we name the perpetrators. It's not weird, and it's not wrong.
Your setting yourself up as the judge of what constitutes showing respect is what's wrong here.
Whimzy, have you ever read the book Radical Chic by Tom Wolfe? It's a pretty reactionary screed, and somewhat nasty in spirit at points, but pretty darned well-written. And I think you might find the authorial politics agreeable.
[Anyone else, duckduckgo that book at your own risk.]