Thread by @JuliusGoat

This is a pretty common thing for people to say, in response to a total refusal to engage with abusive political ideas.

Saying it requires: first, a willingness to overlook intention, action, and effect; and, second, an acceptance of the lie that there are two "sides."

There are hundreds of "sides" — thousands. A wide diversity of lived experience and understandings of how to exist as a human, all trying to figure out how to live with one another in a way that honors the essential humanity and basic needs of everybody.

That's not one "side."

Then there are people who want only certain ways of being human to be recognized, and they want to define those terms, and they intend to punish any infractions against that order, and they want those who don't measure up to change or be punished.

That's not the other "side."

The problem with even talking about "both sides" is, it promotes people with abusive intention and a politics of domination to a state in which they are one of two equal "sides," with literally every other way of being human lumped together as the other "side."

It's a lie.

The problem with even talking about "both sides" is, it accepts the worldview of people with abusive intention and a politics of domination. They win before you start.

The idea there are only two sides, and they are one of them? That's their framing.

It's bullshit. It's a lie.

Listen: All of us, trying to figure out how to honor everyone's basic humanity? WE ARE THE SIDES.

People with a politics of domination have a completely different mission—an unacceptable one.

Our mission is honoring everyone's basic humanity. They aren't a side in that.

When somebody with a disability explains to you how something you've said makes their life more difficult, and you adjust your behavior, do you know what that is?

That's two sides reaching across the aisle to compromise and find solutions.

It's the thing people claim to want.

We ARE the sides.

People of abusive intent with a politics of domination aren't a "side."

They are an obstacle.

You want unity? Good. Us too. All the sides, trying to unify.

But we have obstacles.

You want unity? Stop listening to obstacles.

That's the framing.

If you treat people of abusive intent w/politics of domination as one of two sides, the conversation immediately stops being about figuring out how best to honor the essential humanity and basic needs of everyone, and becomes about WHICH people to exclude, pragmatically speaking.

Which is why—if you want unity—you mustn't treat all "sides" working toward the mission of unity as an equal "side" to the people who are being active intentional obstacles to that mission.

Which is obvious.

Which is what makes people who do so in the name of "unity" so toxic.

If you approach "both sides" in this way, you are actually aligned with a politics of domination and abuse, even if you are arguing against the politics of domination and abuse.

I'll repeat that:

EVEN IF you are arguing against.

So don't.

When you argue, argue better.

Understand you're not arguing with one of two "sides" that must unify.

Understand that you are arguing on behalf of all "sides," against an obstacle to the mission of unity.

Behave accordingly.

/end

Whenever I post something like this, somebody invariably appears to not so much prove my point as embody it.

Anyway literally lol to the "I went to art school to be a writer. I know how they think." A masterpiece in reductive condescension.