@PlasticJohnny Search is just not working today. If you want to try to find them, I wrote two core threads around this time last year, talking about whiteness as an unculture and talking about why the neofolk "band" Heilung speaks to white people in a profound level we don't understand. Both go into it, in one I talk about bluegrass as an ethnic music that isn't "white" actually, etc.
Tagged with #WhitenessIsACult and #AbuseCulture
I've spoken about it in other posts as well, but those cover the broad strokes.
Another one. I recently learned of how in England, leading into the Industrial Revolution the Commons, or commonly owned land that anyone could farm, was sold off by the government to various lords and powerful people in exchange for favors. This forced farm labor into the factories.
Which is exactly the same playbook we see in more recent history in China and south east Asia, where farmland is made untenable for one reason or other, forcing rural farmers into cheap factory labor.
I don't know enough to draw a direct line, but these are the same picture. This is the same playbook.
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A similar through line goes from American slavery to modern policing and prison labor, as documented in the film The 13th.
There are also similar patterns between, say, the Magdalene Laundries in Ireland, native residential schools in the US and Canada, and the Christian affiliated American "troubled teen industry." It is the exact same picture. In fact, I can draw a direct line between the LDS residential placement program (defunct), the YES teen work program in Hawaii, and troubled teen camps (still legally operating).
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During the Inquisition, they imprisoned and tortured accused heretics until they repented.
During the early half of the science of psychiatry, they imprisoned and tortured accused mentally ill people until they proved themselves sane.
This is the same picture.
I wonder if this is one of those things where we can draw a direct through line from the Inquisition through European asylums to the mid-century American mental health industry.
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Half-formed thought:
The security rule "Something you know, something you have, something you are..."
But applied to the control mechanisms of bigotry.
There are people who are marginalized by what they know, those who are marginalized by what they do, and those marginalized by who they are.
A tyrant needs each person to other those people "over there," that you will never be and are not likely to meet. Then needs to other those among you who behave a certain way, to keep you from behaving that way. And other those who know (or believe) the wrong things so that you will avoid learning those things. This creates a self-policing milieu control that comes from many directions.
From the perspective of white, middle class, we have these factors putting in pressures of control from all directions:
Race
Gender
Orientation and gender assignment
Ability
Weight
Religious and political beliefs
Nonwhite race and ethnicity are the others "out there" that you are assigned power over. Gender and disability assigns vertical power dynamics within the group. Orientation assigns hidden shame to those hiding within the group, along with unrealistic cishet sexual norms. Weight and looks standards keep people focused on shaming their own bodies. Religious and political vectors keep people controlling their own minds.
A.R. is dropping some deep wisdom about what I call Abuse Culture. Fascism is peak abuse culture, but it exists in non- or proto-fascist ways, which is why I made an umbrella category.
Because abuser mindsets are counterintuitive to non-abusers. We can't accurately empathize or extrospect with their values. They make no sense (to us). We walk along in our innocence, projecting our reasoning, our feelings, our thought processes on people who aren't even living in the same universe. Because of our ignorance, we allow them to shape *us*, turning us all into their enablers.
A.R. is getting to the meat of that mindset. Reality, to them, is something that a dominant person creates through manipulation and force. They are storytellers who craft the nature of all of existence for everyone else within their influence, by creating the filters of our worldview. They exist outside of fascism, but fascism (or authoritarian systems by other names) is their final form. But they've always been there, even in democracy, pulling our strings, and laughing all the way to the bank.
#AbuseCulture #WhitenessIsACult https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:tzy4hibtkautrntsz5f3ns37/post/3maj226t4p22f
American conservatives and other types of fascist have no desire to return to the days of skillful liars. A person living by a lie told skillfully may have been fooled by the skill. But to force a person to live according to an obvious lie means you have dominated them.
I set aside my assumptions on these fronts many years ago, and it has opened possibilities to me, allowing me to make better relationships with people, animals, and the world around me. It allows me to meet other beings where they are, attempting to communicate on their terms, not mine.
This is the richness we're denied as colonizers.
#philosophy #psychology #WhitenessIsACult #DeconstructWhiteness
We're still conflating intelligence with consciousness I see. And self-awareness. And LIFE. These are actually *four* different properties.
This is colonizer shit, actually. It sets human beings, who possesses -and define- all four, at the very top of an imagined pinnacle, with all other ways to exist defined only by comparison. It limits our ability to think clearly about either concept. This conflation is a huge part of the justification for genocide and oppression (against "lesser" humans), and justification for the exploitation of nature. It has been used to excuse the worst kind of ableism against neurodiverse humans.
Under the guise of science, it is core to the illusion that a hierarchy of life exists at all, instead of a wide array of diverse ways of processing sensory information and selfhood that exist across a spectrum, not just among human minds, but across all kinds of minds, about which we know very, very little. It is based not on evidence, but a mountain of untested (and possibly untestable) assumptions drawn largely by white men, more than a century ago, at the upper tiers of an empire.
I'm not really into arguing over anything today, and I don't have any particular hills to die on. Other than that we think more carefully about what it means to think.
#philosophy #psychology #WhitenessIsACult #DeconstructWhiteness
Mx. Luna Corbden 🐸