• Awoo [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
      26·
      3 days ago

      Calling things “cringe” is a tool social enforcement of anyone that doesn’t fit inside a certain behavioural box. If we don’t think marginalised groups should be marginalised then we shouldn’t use a tool of marginalisation.

      Become the cringe. It’s ok. Be a cringe accelerationist. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cH-uB_eaLvM

      • purpleworm [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
        11·
        3 days ago

        I don’t think this is a line consistently held by the site, see nerd It would be cool if it was, but I think there are some really fundamental issues with the site culture that the user you are responding to is presenting a mild symptom of.

        • Awoo [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
          15·
          2 days ago

          There’s definitely a contingent of people that feel viscerally repulsed by “cringe”. They can’t handle it.

          They need exposure therapy, we should be cringier.

          • purpleworm [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
            10·
            2 days ago

            I don’t think it can be corrected with exposure therapy as the main instrument. There’s a deeper element of reactionary sentiment that extends far past the ability to address indirectly for most people. It needs to be fought directly.

            • Awoo [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
              6·
              2 days ago

              Yeah you’re probably right. In that case there’s either yelling at them or calmly explaining to them why it’s reactionary. I lean towards yelling more often than being calm but both can be useful depending on circumstances. Yelling is probably less useful if we want to like not make people leave because it’s always a bad experience here or whatever.

              • purpleworm [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
                4·
                2 days ago

                I agree that not yelling is generally better, but my stance is that it can’t just be dealt with reactively, it should be brought up as its own subject and discussed with the user base so we can make a policy and deliberate effort toward altering the culture of the site.

                And remove some emojis.

      • yunqihao [comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
        3·
        2 days ago

        If we don’t think marginalised groups should be marginalised then we shouldn’t use a tool of marginalisation.

        Is it a crazy take to say their are groups and actions that deserve to be marginalised as cringe. I’m thinking of groups like the liberal who arrogantly spouts off on a topic they only know of through vibes, reactionaries of all stripes, and being an “apolitical” centrist etc. People who fall into categories such as these deserves to be marginalised as cringe imo for the good of society (and to a point honestly themselves).

        • purpleworm [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
          7·
          2 days ago

          We can reject behaviors on a basis other than vague aestheticized social pressure, because that rejection should be for a reason that isn’t just “vibes” or something happening to be or not be convention.

          I think it’s quite easy to tell someone not to spout off about shit they are ignorant about with authoritative confidence, but I can just tell them as much (or “No investigation, no right to speak”) without needing to resort to a concept like “cringe”.

          • Salah [ey/em]@hexbear.netEnglish
            4·
            2 days ago

            I want to say I really appreciate how you explain things and call out issues in the site culture. When I see your name above a comment I know it will be a good one 👍

            • purpleworm [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
              4·
              2 days ago

              Thanks, I really appreciate it. Almost all I do on this site is compulsively argue with people, so my interactions are overwhelmingly negative or at least a bit unpleasant, and it’s nice to hear that it’s in some way positive for someone.

          • yunqihao [comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
            41·
            2 days ago

            That’s fair. As I said elsewhere I suppose I was thinking of cringe more like a tool similar to the state. One that at current through much of the world is wielded by reactionary forces to further their aims however that once seized would remain a useful tool simply working for different ends. That in a socialist society it isn’t and shouldn’t be acceptable to act as liberals do now and the enforcement of social standards generally manifests through cringe and marginalisation.

        • Awoo [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
          6·
          2 days ago

          You could take the position those actions are cringe from the perspective of a socialist sure, but I don’t know if it’s useful to address the phenomena I’m criticising which is that “cringe” is almost exclusively targeted at queer and socially odd or neurodiverse people.

          I would use a different word entirely to describe those reactionary behaviours purely because I want to reduce the targeting of these groups the “cringe” is almost always used to attack.

          I 100% get where you’re coming from though and you’re not wrong, my point is mainly about strategy.

          • yunqihao [comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
            4·
            2 days ago

            That’s completely fair. I suppose my thoughts when approaching it was to look at it the same way I do the state for example, in that at current through most of the world it’s an oppressive and reactionary force. However it remains a useful tool when seized from the hands of the current liberal hegemonic order that rules over not only the bodies but the minds of much of the people of the world.

            • SerialExperimentsGay [she/her, she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
              61·
              2 days ago

              I am very obviously not “always at 110% aggression with comrades”, i have good and friendly interactions with most users on this site and whenever i have the spoons for it, i put criticism forward in a way that’s less confrontational and more of an effortpost. And guess what, it does not make a fucking difference in regards to how people reply to it. There’s people who can handle criticism and are capable of reflecting on their internalized biases and there’s people who can’t, and no amount of walking on eggshells turns the latter into the former. I’ve seen that over and over again, either you are arguing with somebody who can handle being called out or you don’t. So how hard i go into a discussion like this is dependent on if i have the capacity to write out a little essay about what i find problematic. And if i don’t have that, tough luck.

            • purpleworm [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
              7·
              3 days ago

              She does make good points sometimes, including against some of our own users who are being shitty (I wouldn’t say she’s accomplishing that now, though Euclid makes a good point), and I think that buys her a lot of credibility to get away with things.

              Also the site still has a huge amount of the user base claiming “bullying works,” so being absurdly aggressive is just kind of par for the course if you can find a way of saying your interlocutor is “actually not a comrade but a social chauvinist” (not her words, just a summary of the idea).

          • kristina [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
            21·
            3 days ago

            its pretty easy to be against it, infantilized femininity is a patriarchal tool. some people that are against it could be assimilationist in their reasoning but we are all on a niche communist website yk, probably best to trust but verify. mission-accomplished

            • SerialExperimentsGay [she/her, she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
              6·
              2 days ago

              Patriarchy usually works with double binds. Femininity, whether in its infantilized form or not, isn’t just forced on women, it is at the same time ridiculed and seen as lesser.

              That means that feminism has to take a two-pronged approach, both liberating women and other not-men from the pressure to perform femininity and removing the stigma from that performance.

              Trans women in particular find themselves in a drastically worsened double bind, being forced to constantly prove our femininity while being under perpetual over-scrutinizing of whether we express it in the correct, respectable way.

            • Are_Euclidding_Me [e/em/eir]@hexbear.netEnglish
              41·
              3 days ago

              Unless I’m missing something, the thread being discussed has one comment written in nya speak. If I’m wrong about which thread is being discussed, please do let me know, but like, if I’m not, isn’t a single comment (out of 75), well, it’s nothing, right? And maybe even a little sus that someone is so willing to say “fuck the explicitly queer instance” over a single comment? (1 out of 75, seriously, I can’t believe gramxi and I read the same thread, there must be some mistake!)

              • kristina [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
                8·
                2 days ago

                i mean i doubt its over a single comment, theres a long history as to why we’re not friends with blahaj. we tried to make it work. we voted on it as a site and everyone that talked to blahaj about this and majority of the mod team here are queer/trans. but blahaj is a very top down website, their very libbed up admins want things their way or no way at all, most of the trans people there at least want access to our trans stuff but ada has stonewalled it. i even got quite a lot of trans people on our side together to talk to her about working together to create a joint community to pull trans people off of reddit and she just showed up solo and shat on us for not wanting to do things 100% her way, basically. then she rage quit the chat. (marcie and some other people also helped with arranging this, so it wasnt even a 100% hexbear endeavor)

                also that comment was a pretty old comment maybe they were looking at it when it was first posted.

                • Are_Euclidding_Me [e/em/eir]@hexbear.netEnglish
                  4·
                  2 days ago

                  also that comment was a pretty old comment maybe they were looking at it when it was first posted

                  I wish I had copied some verbiage from gramxi’s comment before they deleted their account so we could quibble a bit more about this, because I don’t think the bit of your comment I just quoted is fair or relevant, but without the original verbiage, it’s a little hard to actually continue the conversation as I want to.

                  But I’ll make my point anyway, even if it’s not as well-backed as I’d like it to be.

                  Gramxi was annoyed enough by the thread to make a comment in which they said that there was a lot of nya speak. I’m curious as to how one comment, a single one, could ever constitute a pattern worth commenting on, even if the thread involved only had, say, 5 comments at the time.

                  Maybe a better way to say this is: I can’t imagine making the complaint gramxi did unless the thread I was complaining about had at least one third (33%) of its comments be written in nya speak. (One third is a little arbitrary, but my point is, I’m not going to complain about a thread being full of nya speak unless there actually is a large proportion of it.) And then at that point, for one comment, a single one to be 1/3 of the thread would mean that the whole thread is only 3 comments. And I’m not going to see any pattern in a 3-comment thread, that’s too few comments!

                  So I guess I’m saying: I don’t think gramxi’s annoyance with the thread is reasonable, because there is no pattern to be seen in one comment, no matter how few other comments there are in the thread.

                  Sorry, this is long-winded and I’m having no luck making it shorter. I hope my point comes through!