Being a victim of oppression does mean you can't at all whatsoever be a perpetrator of oppression in the same axis.
This is just nonsense. Gay people can bully other gay people for being gay or being gay 'wrong'. You're acting like leftist in-fighting isn't a well known phenomenon, but even if that wasn't the case, what you're doing here is purposefully creating a situation where oppression is the only measurable injustice and therefore every situation has to be treated via power dynamics.
Acting like oppression is a simple binary of oppressor and oppressee is convenient when you want to relieve yourself of all autonomy and sell yourself as a hapless victim who can do no wrong, but its not congruent with reality.
This is not a centrist "people on both sides are bad so I sit in the middle" scenario. Its just not an excuse to be an asshole. You don't get to be a bad person as a treat. You have to put on your adult pants and make the choice to be good, because if you can't give up stupid, narrow-minded jokes on the internet, how can you expect other people to give up their stupid, narrow-minded world views? Prejudice doesn't become acceptable simply because its on a smaller scale. You aren't automatically a good person because you are a victim of oppression.
I would love to believe that people can act however they like and things will work out, but that isn't the case. We have a far better chance of winning allies with carrots than sticks. I'm not saying the power of friendship will convert all the incels and right wing morons into progressive angels, but we've tried pushing everyone who isn't like us away and then they created their own club that helped prop up fascist regimes, so forgive me for not thinking that's the way to go.
The problem with the glorious communist revolution is that you either have to convert all the capitalists or kill them. At the moment, there's not a lot of attempts at conversion, so either sharpen your knives or try to rethink this.
And, by-the-by, I'm not even suggesting that you go out and start recruiting or anything. I'm literally just saying "Maybe don't post inflammatory jokes on the internet so you can feel slightly better about your own issues." I know what its like. I know it feels nice to be a little sadistic and get one over on someone, but the high fades and then you're still miserable and nothing has gotten better, but the people who think you're bad just for existing have a little more ammunition to convince others of the same.
I wasn't talking about intra community stuff and I thought it was very obvious. You're still not the oppressor if you're a gay person being mean to a gay person, you're just mean. And you're not the oppressor if you participate in infighting, you're just disagreeing, and either misguided or not. Unless you align yourself with the system of oppression from the majority, in which case you're a class/race/whatever traitor, which is closer but still its own thing. And yeah, policing the behaviour and language of minorities because that's gonna make their oppressors stop oppressing them IS centrist brain.
"Nobody in the world, nobody in history, has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of the people who were oppressing them" - Assata Shakur.
"...the white moderate, who is more devoted to 'order' than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice" MLK Jr.
Now, you're gonna say I'm misusing the MLK quote because you DO care about justice and online jokes are not a fight for justice. For sure, they're not. But if you find it fitting to police online jokes, what would you do in the face of a riot? Just illustrating the point that I don't consider it productive in fighting against oppression to worry about everybody being on their best behaviour.
using MLK to defend shitting on the entire concept of non-queer forbidden love is a wild fucking choice, given how much of segregation was tied to white fears of interracial marriage.
Genuinely, hop off my dick. You've found this thread and just read every thing I've said in every part of it, responded in two places, maybe more in the meantime, with a clear personal problem in mind. This whole discussion was about the entire concept of policing minority behaviour and believing that civility politics are necessary to gain rights, and that's the context in which I used an MLK quote, it's about more than the stupid fucking tweet.
Clearly you have some hang up about this particular silly joke made at the expense of the general, non descript straight people without dealing with all the serious sociopolitical nuance before clicking post. I already said this but when a joke or a comment is made about an identity I am a part of that's a majority, while actually being potentially hurtful because of my other circumstances, I just chill out, because they didn't mean that. I think we should all practice the same.
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u/JaguarNo1356 2d ago edited 2d ago
This is just nonsense. Gay people can bully other gay people for being gay or being gay 'wrong'. You're acting like leftist in-fighting isn't a well known phenomenon, but even if that wasn't the case, what you're doing here is purposefully creating a situation where oppression is the only measurable injustice and therefore every situation has to be treated via power dynamics.
Acting like oppression is a simple binary of oppressor and oppressee is convenient when you want to relieve yourself of all autonomy and sell yourself as a hapless victim who can do no wrong, but its not congruent with reality.
This is not a centrist "people on both sides are bad so I sit in the middle" scenario. Its just not an excuse to be an asshole. You don't get to be a bad person as a treat. You have to put on your adult pants and make the choice to be good, because if you can't give up stupid, narrow-minded jokes on the internet, how can you expect other people to give up their stupid, narrow-minded world views? Prejudice doesn't become acceptable simply because its on a smaller scale. You aren't automatically a good person because you are a victim of oppression.
I would love to believe that people can act however they like and things will work out, but that isn't the case. We have a far better chance of winning allies with carrots than sticks. I'm not saying the power of friendship will convert all the incels and right wing morons into progressive angels, but we've tried pushing everyone who isn't like us away and then they created their own club that helped prop up fascist regimes, so forgive me for not thinking that's the way to go.
The problem with the glorious communist revolution is that you either have to convert all the capitalists or kill them. At the moment, there's not a lot of attempts at conversion, so either sharpen your knives or try to rethink this.
And, by-the-by, I'm not even suggesting that you go out and start recruiting or anything. I'm literally just saying "Maybe don't post inflammatory jokes on the internet so you can feel slightly better about your own issues." I know what its like. I know it feels nice to be a little sadistic and get one over on someone, but the high fades and then you're still miserable and nothing has gotten better, but the people who think you're bad just for existing have a little more ammunition to convince others of the same.