DrivebyHaiku
Okay… There’s a whole issue with setting yourself in between someone’s expression of frustration at something sucky they experience and the problem itself. One of the things that helps is learning to temporarily shelve your priorities. Listen to people as if you were a complete outsider. Someone is telling you about their feelings and that often isn’t intended to be in competition with your feelings… Until somebody makes it a competition. The minute you try and make it a competition you have demonstrated to that person that you aren’t listening to their concerns. In doing that you make everything about your own priorities and that person who was frustrated isn’t in a place where they have reserves of energy to be kind and you just stepped inside the radius of a problem that you yourself were before only tangential to because you shut them down. Effectively you’ve said “Whatever, let’s talk about my needs.”
This move intended or not sucks all the oxygen in the room that could be devoted to making things better into addressing your problem if some one is empathetic to you or as an extention of the inertia behind addressing problem. Neither is good.
Let’s take an example. Say I go to my boss with a problem. Say it’s a matter of policy and it’s impacting my life negatively. Now my boss maybe didn’t write the rule which created the problem but they’ve enforced it in the past. As I am expressing how this policy effects me the boss starts acting huffy and going “Oh you must think I’m such a bad boss. How could you think that? Don’t you know how much I care about the people in my employ?” All of a sudden as an employee I now have a whole new problem to deal with because this person isn’t going to address my problem, they just became a new problem for me to deal with. Now you have a frustrated employee who isn’t in a position to solve the policy problem either having to console their boss or try and correct them back on course to realizing that the policy problem… Hasn’t changed. Nobody in a place to do better has acknowledged it even exists.
What would you think about the actions of that boss in the employee’s shoes?
I don’t feel like digging through JKR’s body of work to find perfect quoted examples but if you feel inclined go back over Hermione’s advocacy yourself she is framed by author as “smuggly” shaking her collecting tin, cornering people in house common spaces until people acquiesce just to get her to go away. Every time her protest is brought up it is usually paired with some kind of value judgement device where the reader is made aware of the apathy of her friends or the people she’s advocating to or the annoyance she is on people in her space.
What Hermione does is a reasonable response for a person her age. What the author creates around that is a atmosphere of hopelessness where Hermione feels personally fufilled by the virtue of the cause but everything in the narrative conspires to make sure you know she’s tilting at windmills.
I mean Cholera is kind of not the issue here. This creek has habitually tested high for e coli. An e coli infection makes cholera seem tame. You treat cholera it’s got a mortality rate of less than 1%… E coli infection has a mortality rate around 17% slightly less than one in five people who get hit die from renal failure. Those odds go up significantly for kids…
This idiot brought his grandkids to splash in this e coli laced stream. I am without words.
I mean when you look at Harry Potter through a magnifying glass it’s actually very pro status quo with a lot of issues breaking down to “the wrong people in charge” a lot of gestures made towards the sort of social problems of the society… Like look at house elves. We meet Dobby and everyone agrees that slave holding situation isn’t ideal but once we meet more house elves we learn that Dobby is kind of a weirdo and that they are effectively a sentient slave race with only exceptions like Dobby taking issue with being bound. Hermione sees this as a legitimate issue as any potential elf could be a Dobby but then great detail is placed about how annoying and virtually pointless her advocacy is but the rest of her society and the framing effectively informs the reader - “don’t think about house elves. Dobby is fine. It’s not your problem and shouldn’t be.” It’s framed as a problem to be solved on a small scale interpersonal basis because by and large the system works.
It’s generally difficult for people to critically read a narrative that throws up that many hairpin bends particularly when the set ups are made in the book that these things are social problems… but then never paid off. That it happens a fair amount innthe books is a fairly confusing yarnball. It feels progressive in the same way a company mission statement that is not being enacted in any real way feels progressive.
Neoliberalism is very specifically a breed of political thought that came about with the likes of Margaret Thatcher and Jimmy Carter that seeks to create new markets out of previously held government bodies in the name of austerity or protectionist principles and cuts help for disadvantaged people. Think privatization of government service, liquidation of government assets under the guise of saving taxpayer money, removing restrictions/protections on the consumer market and manufacturing sector and dissolving the welfare state or services that soften the blow of being unemployed or unable to work.
Neoliberalism is often used by people on the right to describe the “Progressivish Liberal identifying party of the hour” but it is inaccurate. While Democrats flirt with Neoliberalism under the guise of courting people who like tax cuts Republicans are straight up Neoliberals. Basically old school liberalism believes in a body of rights, a reasonably unrestricted market and a democratic system of governance. Neoliberalism believes first and foremost the market will sort everything out (or is a scam so that people in government can sell it off peicemeal for personal kickbacks.)
Neoliberalism is incompatible and kind of the exact opposite of socialism which seeks to expand sectors of public protections and publicly held wealth.
I mean dude, love the energy but this isn’t a protest to those laws… that’s just going out for enough time in public to need to use a public restroom as a trans man.
Trans men getting arrested by police for ‘causing a disturbance’ by being forced to use the women’s bathroom isn’t a bug, it’s a transphobic feature. They want to make being trans as uncomfortable as possible because they think that if they can ratchet up the discomfort level less people will attempt to transition. Trans men who pass on average are massively uncomfortable using the ladies room because it’s a great way to get arrested by cops, hastled by security, banned from private property, assaulted by women, yelled at and abused because everyone assumes you are a cis male creep, they want you to suffer for being trans or they just don’t care.
Like trans women are generally the forefront of the conversation but when it comes to trans men this isn’t “malicious compliance.” it’s either compliance compliance or stealthily breaking the law and hoping nobody notices. The trans deterrent system is operating as intended.
Well the good news is that AI has zero ability to make value judgements on normalacy of veiws or interpret novel data. It’s just fancy statistics that you can manually set parameters on what to favour or rules to follow.
Just cuz it gets more of something doesn’t mean it starts picking sides. People are paid to fine tune it’s reactions and conclusions manually.
Very individualized as per need. Non-binary is an umbrella term for a whole bunch of different situations so what feels right is going to be very different for someone who feels like say a mix of masculine and feminine versus someone who has dysphoric reactions to any and all gender markers. It’s going to be different for someone whose identity is more static than say someone who fluidly bounces between extremes.
If you know someone who is non-binary that’s essentially just the tip of the iceberg of a whole discussion about how they personally interact with their body or the culture of gender. A lot of people seem to treat it as a full stop third category which can actually be a disservice to a non-binary person because it oftentimes just leads to a lot of new assumptions and frames out some of the ways they could be better treated than just as automatically genderless. I’ve heard of mixes of Mom/Dad for bigender people, just Mom or Dad for trans masc/femme folk, Completely new words that do not have cultural baggage, or just “my parent”. It’s not a one size fits all situation.
