I’ve had an epiphany recently, and after it I find myself feeling slightly less male, less cis, less hetero, and even slightly less “white”. All of these things are social constructs to one degree or another, after all. For a long time now, the only thing I’ve really truly identified with very strongly is “human”.
Not sure where I’ll end up; maybe I won’t go very far, but I look forward to the journey!
In America, nobody is ever surprised to learn I’m Mexican.
Though, there was that one guy who thought I was Russian.
As a white person, when talking to people irl should I say 'Pewdiepie called someone a nigger" or “Pewdiepie called someone ‘the n-word’”?
I never say that word out loud unless I’m directly quoting someone.
The former can go wrong. The latter can not.
As a brown dude I’ve been perceived as being Pakistani, Indian, Arab, Moroccan, Spanish, Portuguese, Polish, Bulgaria… you get the idea.
No one suspects that my parents are from the Caribbean, or that my heritage is very mixed. To be fair, at least half of my ancestry is South Asian.
I like when people don’t know exactly what my heritage is, they have no idea what kind of racism to assume. Till they hear my London ‘accent’ and resort to calling me a snob.
¯_(ツ)_/¯
Have you all ever heard of MGTOW (Men going their own way)? It’s about men that shun romantic and marriage with women. It’s like a misogynistic monk order. Very strange.
It’s all deeply misogynistic and flawed. These aren’t ace or aro people, they are men who claim that women have somehow wronged them or that the system is broken or rigged against them. This of course ignores the very real nature of our society actually giving disadvantage to women, and that no one is owed sex or romance at all.
Also that it’s generally their own behavior towards women that makes them single, not any kind of inherent bias women would have against them.
Best not to use n-word, even in quoting.
MGTOW is to male self-betterment as Gamergate is to ethics in video game journalism.
If you want to be a monk, you can be an actual monk. I’ve considered it, but all the options are pretty religious. Also, not very compatible with nerdy biz.
You could always start your own monastic order. Monastic Geeks of Scott.
Or practice Rinzai Zen. Get your koan on.
My own school won’t work. Where does the money come from? Catholic types got church gold.
As for Zen, that’s probably not going to work either. I’m in it for the free room food and board without having a job deal. Not the life of difficult training deal.
If you need to be more specific than “n-word” when quoting, I guess using hyphens instead of spelling it out may be okay, e.g. n-----r or something… but I feel a bit dirty even doing that.
Am I the only person who believes that it is an inalienable human right to go and live anywhere on Earth? I see lots of discussion about immigration, but I don’t see people making this argument. IMO the system of citizenship, passports, and visas are in and of themselves a human rights violation. It should not be illegal to simply “be somewhere” or “be somewhere for too long.” All people should be free to go and stay in any place they please. All humans share the earth equally.
And because I know people here are semantic pedants, obviously I’m just talking about immigration. Don’t start talking about trespassing at the nuclear facility because that is “being somewhere.” Also don’t talk to me about customs checking for contraband, that’s fine too. It’s also fine to stop known criminals at the border, such as a murderer who is trying to flee. It’s also fine to stop disease carrying people who might bring the zombie plague to the last safe island nation.
How voting rights, government benefits, etc. are handled doesn’t change the fact that nobody should be arrested or deported just because they were staying in the wrong place on earth with the wrong papers. Nobody should be arrested or prevented from engaging in legal activities, like buying a house or getting a job, just because they do them in the “wrong” country. There is no wrong country. Its our Earth, and all humans should have a right to make their home on it wherever they feel is best.
I disagree. I think there are people who have had their lands violated, appropriated, colonized etc. should have full reign to be as strict as they please. It’s easy to say we should be able to do so-and-so equally, but those statements rarely take history into consideration.
I’m back to being more like a normal human now, but I’ve actually spent a lot of my life as someone who would effectively be called an MGTOW. Of course, I never identified as such and I avoid people who do, because most of those people are seriously problematic.
In my case, I think it’s something that I internalized because I saw that relationships could cause people to get hurt, and some people much more so than others. I also saw some of the behaviours of men who were more aggressive and sexist, and was deeply afraid of being like those people.
Of course, my own self-image issues may have been a larger factor; I generally assumed that no one would be attracted to me anyway. I realize now that I probably still ended up being rude to or hurting some people because I tended to avoid people I might be attracted to, though.
Between those two issues, I also ended up repressing my sexuality significantly. It wasn’t even a big deal, really.
Later in my life I basically kept the same thing up, but more recently it has been because I want to avoid having additional ties to Brisbane, which despite being a major city is still kind of a rural backwater on a global scale.
Now that I’ve come out of a phase of depression I feel a lot better about the whole thing, and I feel like having a relationship is something I really could pull off, but I’m still mostly going to avoid relationships because I don’t intend to stay in Brisbane for that much longer.
That said, regardless of how I began the path and where I’ve ended up now, it’s completely possible that in some alternate world I would have ended up as a for-realz MGTOW, or worse. I didn’t end up that way, but it’s not that difficult for me to imagine a path that could have led me there. The thought horrifies me, but it seems nevertheless to be true, and I’m not going to deny it simply because I would be more comfortable believing otherwise.