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

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

Is it a watch?

Or is it an arm shackle with a timer?

#WhitenessIsACult

Kill the colonizer in your head.

#WhitenessIsACult #AbuseCulture

You can never make me believe a Black person would kill themself by public hanging.

That's an extraordinary claim requiring bonkers levels of evidence.

But somehow there's a rash of these claims lately.

The only people who believe this shite are willfully ignorant of any meaningful aspect of reality.

I usually make space for ignorance, because I used to be like that, but I'm not giving one inch on this one.

(I'm not even sure I would have believed it even when I was sheltered.)

#WhitenessIsACult

@KimCrayton1 This one has been coming up in my recommended feed, but I haven't watched because it feels too much like "work."
😂 (I write about Mormonism.) But you're right — the parallels between a high-demand religion like Mormonism and whiteness are uncanny.

It's interesting that someone must take the load so that white men can avoid feeling friction... 🤔 "emotional labor." It's possible to feel so much friction that it breaks you. I'll have to think about how that dynamic looks within Mormonism. I think it breaks some Mormon women, who are taught to take on every extra load. It breaks LGBTQ Mormons. And it's directed outward, at the peoples it has colonized, and those it seeks to dominate.

After I left, I had to become comfortable with friction. I think it's why so many exmormons go politically leftward and often become progressive activists.

#WhitenessIsACult #AbuseCulture