[sudo-discuss] cuddling it

Sun May 5 14:10:07 PDT 2013

Rachel, I've had a bit more time to reflect on what you wrote, and while I
don't have anything to add about the immediate question beyond what I said
yesterday, I'd like to talk about some of the broader context you brought
up in your reply and the more general issues involved.

The first thing is that I am primarily viewing what we are trying to do as
having a discussion, so it seems to me that when there are
misunderstandings that is exactly when we should be having more discussion
to clarify what we are trying to say and find out effective ways to say it,
not less. Meanwhile, you are using the terms of some sort of power struggle
where I am being attacked and defending myself and allegiances are forming
and shifting around the patterns of conflict. I do not see a power struggle
but rather a community trying to communicate and communication depends on
shared understanding among senders and recipients of symbols and how to use
them to convey meaning. Where this is not immediately clear, clarifying it
explicitly seems the most direct way to move towards better mutual
understanding. I hope this can be reconciled with your own views and I
welcome further discussion on this.

Within the attacking and defending point of view, I am also uncomfortable
with some things. To speak of attacking and defending and also then to say
that the subject of the attack should *stop defending* reminds me too much
of the revolting cries of "stop resisting" from police - I could certainly
never meditate on such an ugly phrase and I find the suggestion grotesque.
It's something I've heard while authoritarian thugs victimize people who
are not resisting but only perhaps trying to maintain their safety and
dignity under an uninvited attack, perhaps not even that, and one way the
phrase is used is as a disingenuous way of framing the situation so that
later, biased interpretations of what happened will have something to latch
onto. I am glad we have much less at stake in our interactions here than in
those situations but I still really don't like to see us internalizing that
logic in how we handle communications in our group.

There is another aspect of this I am uncomfortable with, which is the idea
that people should respond to feedback only by silently assenting. This
reminds me too much of other situations where people, sometimes myself,
were supposed to be seen and not heard, and it deprives people of agency
over and responsibility for what they do by expecting them to let others
determine their behavior unilaterally. I am happy to take feedback and,
generally, I hope you can trust people to act on feedback appropriately
rather than trying to short-circuit their agency. The more informative
feedback is, then, the better, and it should contain information people can
use themselves to evaluate what they are doing the way others do so they
can figure out how to accommodate everyone's needs. When feedback consist
simply of naked statements it is too much like trolling in the small or
gaslighting in the large, and especially then, amounts to an insidious way
to deprive people of agency by conditioning them to fear unpredictable pain
when they exercise agency, and has a chilling effect. In general, the idea
that certain people are less able than others to handle the
responsibilities of being human, and so they should have their behaviors
dictated to them unilaterally by others, is a key to justifying many
regimes of oppression, especially modern ones, and because of that I am
very uncomfortable when I see any example of that logic being internalized
in our group dynamics.

I don't know what passed between you and Eddan involving trump cards but if
the card game analogy really is apt then it may be a sign of trivializing
the question of safe space by saying that certain people's concerns trump
other people's concerns, based not on the concerns themselves, but only on
who is raising the concerns. Both are important. I have heard some
justifications for 'trumping' as I understand it that remind me of the
debate around the Oscar Grant case. There, defenders of Mehserle's conduct
claimed that police should be the judges of what legitimate police use of
force is because they have special training and experience that give them a
uniquely relevant perspective on what violence is justified and what
demands of compliance they can legitimately make of people. Another
justification I heard was that police are especially vulnerable due to the
danger inherent in their duties and so things should be biased heavily
towards a presumption of legitimacy when they use violence or demand
compliance. To me both these justifications seem problematic because they
create a class that can coerce others without accountability and can
unilaterally force standards of conduct on others. I am happy that there is
much less at stake among us here than there is in cases of police brutality
or Oscar Grant's case, and that there is no comparison other than this
logic being used. But the logic that certain people's perspectives are
uniquely relevant, or that their vulnerability gives them license to force
things upon others unilaterally, is still a logic I don't think we should
internalize among ourselves, because it produces unaccountable
authoritarianism that can be exploited for unintended ends, and does not
help with the ostensibly intended ones anyway. It results in us 'policing'
ourselves in a way much too much like the way the cities are policed to the
detriment of many people and of values we share.

Finally, you mentioned the evening at Marina's apartment and I want to
clarify my experience of what happened there. My 'aha' moment didn't have
anything to do with the point you were trying to make - I can't even
remember exactly what that point was, because it is so strongly
overshadowed by my memory of how you treated me. You called me out for
something that had passed between you and me in the middle of a social
gathering among a mix of friends and strangers, none of whom were involved,
which immediately put me in a very uncomfortable situation. Then, you
dismissed my attempts to defer speaking to a more appropriate setting, and
to open up a dialog with you where I shared my perspective. The only way
out you gave me was to assent without comment to you. My 'aha' moment was
when I realized that things between us had degenerated to that point; it
was when I realized I was mistaken in trying to have a discussion because
we were interacting like two territorial animals, or like a police
interrogator and a suspect, and you were simply demanding a display of
submission or contrition from me before you would let me slink off. While
it felt degrading, I took the way out you offered to spare myself and the
others in the room the experience of things continuing. I take the risk of
sharing this openly with you now because I think we know each other much
better than we did then and we would never again end up interacting like
potentially hostile strangers passing in the night, or worse. I think we
can and should and have been doing better, and overall it's best not to let
a mistaken assumption about what I was thinking and how I felt influence an
important discussion about how we treat one another in our community.

I, like you, hope you can appreciate that I am taking the time to write
this admittedly long-winded reply, not to suck the air out of the room,
whatever that means, but to contribute to a discussion that moves us
towards a better shared understanding of how to respect our shared values
and towards more appreciation of one another's perspectives.

Anthony

On Sat, May 4, 2013 at 10:14 AM, rachel lyra hospodar
<rachelyra at gmail.com>wrote:

> I am really sad about this whole thread.
>
> Anthony, I think I know you well enough to say that your intent here was
> not to be offensive, but unfortunately... Here we are. I am responding to
> the specific message below because it is the one that made me want to
> unsubscribe from this mailing list and unassociate myself from this group.
> Everything that came after, gah.
>
> Anti-oppression for the priveleged class, ie not being an unintentional
> giant jerkface: if someone points out that you are offending or harming
> them, they are not seeking an explanation, but a change in behavior.
> Perhaps an apology or acknowledgement, even a query. If someone says 'i
> think your POV is fucked up and harmful' please do not go on to elaborate
> on your POV to them. Even if you think they don't get your amazing nuances.
> Your amazing nuances are not always important, and part of 'oppression' is
> that some peoples' nuances are always shoved in other people's faces.
> Sometimes being a friend means keeping your opinion to your damn self.
>
> This relates to something that eddan has on occasion termed 'the trump
> card'.  We are all individuals, and as such we ultimately need to keep our
> own house in order. The trump card concept relates to safe spaces - as safe
> as eddan might feel in a space, I'm not going to average it together with
> my safety levels to achieve some sort of average safety rating. My safety
> reading of a space will always, for me, trump eddan's, and while I am happy
> if he feels safe it doesn't really matter to my safety level.
>
> The interesting thing about telling most people they are making you feel
> unsafe, or that they are offending you, is that for some reason their
> response is almost never 'gosh, whoops!'. It's more usually like what
> happened here - a bunch of longwinded explanation that completely misses
> the point, and then a perceived ally of the offender jumping in, also
> talking a lot, and sucking all the air out of the room.  People always have
> reasoning for why they did what they did. Requiring offended folks to read
> about your reasoning for why you said what you said misses the point, and
> to me makes this conversation read like you don't care if you were
> offensive.
>
> It's deja vu to me that you are giving all this definition and explanation
> around the terms you used. It seems identical to our debate around the use
> of 'constable' and it is sad to me to see you take refuge in the same
> pattern of defense. It doesn't matter about the etymological history of a
> phrase. It doesn't. As fun as you may find it to think about, the way
> things are *heard*, by others, NOW, is a trump card for many.
>
> Anthony, I hope you can understand that I have taken the time out of my
> life to write this message in the hopes of helping you to modulate your
> behavior to be less offensive. I am sure you remember the first time I
> engaged with you on this topic, at Marina's house. Perhaps you'll remember
> the aha moment when you *stopped defending* and simply accepted the input,
> thanking me. Perhaps you'll find in that a sort of meditative place of
> return.
>
> Good luck to you all. I enjoy many things about sudo community and am sure
> I will stay connected in many ways.
>
> R.
>  On May 3, 2013 3:05 PM, "Anthony Di Franco" <di.franco at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Doesn't the civilized psyche secretly crave the things it sets itself
>> apart from and gives up and projects on its image of the noble savage
>> though?
>>
>> Your description seems more like meditatively flowing through it.
>>
>>
>> On Fri, May 3, 2013 at 2:58 PM, netdiva <netdiva at sonic.net> wrote:
>>
>>> Here I was thinking "killing it" was just another example of
>>> appropriation of african american vernacular by the mainstream.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On 5/3/2013 2:46 PM, Leonid Kozhukh wrote:
>>>
>>>> "killing it" is a recently popular term to denote excellence and
>>>> immense progress. it has a violent, forceful connotation.
>>>>
>>>> friends in the circus community - through empirical evidence - have
>>>> established a belief that operating at the highest levels of talent
>>>> requires mindfulness, awareness, and calm. thus, a better term, which they
>>>> have started to playfully use, is "cuddling it."
>>>>
>>>> thought sudoers would appreciate this.
>>>>
>>>> cuddling it,
>>>>
>>>> --
>>>> len
>>>>
>>>> founder, ligertail
>>>> http://ligertail.com
>>>>
>>>>
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>>
>>
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