Another example that riled up the right was the removal of confederate monuments after murder of George Floyd. To me it is a stronger form of taking down a picture of an ex or removing a book from the bookshelf you know you won’t read or use, but it seeing it reminds of you of bad times. And to me it resonates to the objection to cancel culture. A group canceling someone is a collective securing psychological safety rather than an individual. A perceived noise source is disconnected. Perhaps there is signal in that noise, but it is deemed not worth the cycles to filter it.
These things, I’d argue, are like a cleaning-out dirty records from a database (or attenuating weights on the connections of a neuron, etc.), and directing attention elsewhere. It’s necessary because attention can’t be given to everything. Some axioms contradict other axioms. However, it means relearning how to interact in a world without those people or objects. Learning is hard, and people resist doing it. They’d rather have their dirty database and expect others to conform to it. From: Friam <friam-boun...@redfish.com> On Behalf Of steve smith Sent: Saturday, November 9, 2024 9:46 AM To: friam@redfish.com Subject: Re: [FRIAM] How democracies die On 11/9/24 9:06 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote: Someone I know decided to legally change their name (not their gender) when they were relatively young. Their family (young and old) simply refused to respect this change, and to this day continues to use their given name. It’s malicious and I see it causes pain. It seems to me the discomfort with trans people in part comes from refusing to revise knowledge and let people that wish to divorce aspects of the past. I am not sure whether this is a preference or a cognitive limitation of the people that do it. I think some of both. And I know (of) several people who have entirely turned their backs on their families of origin, sometimes just on their parents, other times on specific siblings, and other times the entire nuclear family-of-origin. In most cases, as best I can tell, this was not over any singular incident or grievance but in fact a pattern of the group entirely denying the reality of the individual? It seems more rare for an individual to be excommunicated from the (family) group entirely, just avoided/shunned somewhat (e.g. Q/MAGA-ranting uncle given the wrong time for T-day dinner so those who want to leave early can avoid him entirely). I suspect those who extracted themselves from the toxicity of their family-of-origin so completely knew something the rest of the group was willfully ignorant of about themselves. I've been "threatened" by others' self-image/identity before... sometimes because it is a belligerent, threatening identity (e.g. EricS's "performative cruelty" admonition), and sometimes because it reflects back to me something about myself I don't want to see (including possible streaks of "performative cruelty"). But in the long run, I think it has provided me with some reflective guidance on "who *I* want to be" (whatever that agentic-free-will concept grounds to). The current fetish for (toxic-levels) of alpha-masculinity (Trump/Rogan/Musk weird-energy-triumvirate?) seem to be (everything) phobic... I have ideated on each of their brands of "success" (wealth, power, influence, physical prowess) and even obtained little-fish/big-puddle quantities from time to time, but fundamentally it did not satisfy (or maybe the grapes were just sour?).
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