The Dreamwidth Account

(In response to: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/feb/16/belittling-the-canberra-convoy-protesters-will-just-push-ostracised-people-further-into-their-bunkers)

I read this article, and I thought "gee, it's nice Simon Copland is able to feel some sympathy for the various protesters out there." But I rather disagree with his premise that "We must seek to understand and address their feelings".

Mr Copland talks about these protesters having formed an "intimate public" group as part of the camp and the protest, and yeah, I can understand that. Heck, I've been part of "intimate public" groups myself - I've gone to science fiction and fantasy conventions, and I've camped out at the Canberra show-grounds myself as part of the National Folk Festival. So I can sympathise with the protesters feeling disappointed, even despairing, when the event breaks up, and they have to go home, resume their everyday life, and deal with being an ordinary part of society again, after a few days (or weeks) of being something extra-ordinary. It's a bit of a let-down, and it's not the most enjoyable situation to be in.

But I think while we're busy looking so hard at the humanity of these protesters, we need to also pay attention to the thing which has united them together. This isn't just a gathering of people who have got together to celebrate a relatively harmless hobby (like folk music, or enjoyment of a genre of entertainment). This is a group of people who got together in defence of an ideology of "liberation" which rests very solidly on the idea that their personal freedom to perform certain activities over-rides the right of anyone else in the country to enjoy a safe, healthy life.

The people in this convoy who "lost friends over [their] views" lost those friends, almost certainly, because of their ideological stance.

Their ideological stance, in a lot of cases, involves effectively telling a lot of other people that they are dispensable. That they are not as human as the holders of this particular stance, and therefore do not merit the same level of consideration. For example, as an autistic person, I'm not considered by many anti-vaccination thinkers to be as human as they are - my existence, to them, is something to be feared, to be dreaded, and something that should not be. To a lot of anti-vaxxers, I am a monster, and I belong dead.

Forgive me for disagreeing with them on that one.

For the sovereign citizens, and the other extreme glibertarians in the crowd, there is nobody on the planet who is as human as they are, and they are fighting hard for their right not to be bound by the dictates of wider society. Mind you, when you stop and talk to a lot of them, you find out what they're actually fighting for (once you strip out the rhetoric, and boil things down to their core notions) is that they should share in the benefits of society (things like infrastructure, services and so on) but not have to deal with any of the costs of society. There's a reason a lot of billionaires in the USA describe themselves as "libertarians", after all. To these people, as a person who has relied on social security to survive at times, and who is going to be looking for support from the NDIS in order to be able to live a slightly fuller (and healthier) life than I do at present, I am anathema. Again, I belong dead, because I am a "parasite" who needs a bit of help from other people in order to be able to contribute fully to society (like a lot of people with disabilities).

Again, I disagree with them as well.

The neo-Nazis in the crowd think I should be dead because I'm a person with a disability (and even more so because I'm a white woman who has reached the end of her reproductive life and not bred good little white children for the nation). Of course, I'm part of a very long list of people they think belong dead, starting with the indigenous owners of this continent, and moving on from there covering things like "people who aren't white enough", "people who aren't Christian", "people who aren't Australian enough", right the way along to "people who don't entirely agree with their every thought".

Do I need to say I disagree with their point of view? Or can we take this as read?

Now, I agree with Mr Copland that it's good these people found a sense of community in their convoy. Community is a human thing, a thing everyone who is human wants and needs to be part of. But let's not lose sight of the fact that these people, this community, want to deny a lot of other people the opportunity to be part of any community at all (much less theirs). There are the immunocompromised and people with "pre-existing conditions" (by which, apparently, the health authorities mean "anyone in less than 100% health, both physical and psychological") who currently aren't able to take part in community events, because it isn't safe for them to risk infection - and let's note this group skews strongly toward those who are on lower incomes, those who are in rural areas rather than urban areas, those who are indigenous, those who are disabled and so on. There are the elderly, who are both vulnerable to things like COVID due to issues of age-related physical and mental deterioration, and also vulnerable because their living systems mean they're unable to move away from sources of potential exposure. The same applies to persons with disability who are living in supported accommodation.

I'm sure a lot of us can talk about people who very literally haven't left their houses if they could possibly avoid it since the pandemic started spreading back in February 2020, simply because they don't want to risk their lives. I'm sure there's a lot of us who fall into that group ourselves.

According to these protesters, we deserve to die, so long as they can carry on acting as though the bad things in the world won't touch them. While the protesters are "expressing genuinely held feelings", as per Mr Copland, I'm sure Mr Copland can also understand that quite frankly, if these people want me to meet them half-way, then they have to start by acknowledging my genuinely held feeling that I am as human as they are, possessed of the same essential humanity, and stop upholding ideologies which say I'm expendable. I'm more than happy to form a community with any of the protesters. Whether they can say the same about me is on them. But I'm more than happy to meet them half-way. It's just the half-way point where I'm prepared to meet them is one where they recognise I don't deserve to die simply because of who I am. If they have a lot of travelling to do to get there, then that is on them, not on me.

1) ( Potentially distressing content under the fold )

2) In my other class, we're studying Foucault (a quick introduction to Foucault, discourse, and so on), and one of our readings is bringing up examples of current events (current at the time of writing/publication for the reading ... which was published in 2000) in US politics. Things like the Anita Hill case, the Clinton impeachment and so on. I was reading this yesterday and thinking "damn it, Brett Kavanaugh can't stop getting into everything". I'm hoping the rest of my readings this week won't be so... inadvertently synchronisticly appropriate, damn it.

3) One of the things I was asked to listen to for a previous weeks readings for one of my classes was "Four Chord Song" by Axis of Awesome[1]. Which means I'm now hearing the chord structures and bass line of a lot of what I'm listening to these days, and thinking about the ways that various chord patterns are used and re-used to create music. There's the standard four chord song, the twelve-bar blues, the Romanesca (aka "that one in Pachelbel's Canon") and so on. So that gives me a bit of something to think about when I'm busy listening to music to block out the extraneous noise while I'm doing my uni readings.

4) As a side effect of stress, I am currently dealing with a complete lack of spoons for actual sensible cooking stuff. Which means I'm eating a lot of stuff which can be cooked by throwing it into the oven and reheating it. (Yes, I know this isn't healthy in the long term, but unless someone else is volunteering to come and cook for me for free, I suspect I'm going to be sticking with this for a while). One thing I have worked out is that it is cheaper for me to buy a $2.90 box of Coles plain brand frozen chicken nuggets, and re-heat them at home, than it is to get one of those "24 nuggets for $10" deals from KFC or Maccas - for $10 I can get three boxes of Coles nuggets, for a total of 66 of the little bastards, and all I have to supply is the oven to reheat them. Plus I can have my choice of dipping sauces (at present, the winner is Fountain Hot Chilli sauce) rather than being stuck with the options of watered down Sweet Chilli Sauce, or watered down Sweet and Sour Sauce or whatever. So, that can stand in for my reviews of recipes. I'll do more of them when I have the time and spoons to cook again.

5) Latest book up for the Farewell Re-read treatment is "The Ultimate Dracula" - a collection of short stories on a rather predictable theme, edited by Byron Preiss.


[1] In the words of Neil Innes: "I've suffered for my art; now it's your turn."

PS: I was serious about the Twitter thing. If you see me on Twitter any time before this whole thing has simmered down, remind me to get the fsck off there for the good of my blood pressure.

Am I odd because I tend to see things like the Damore memo (the "Google manifesto", the thing which got James Damore sacked from Google for creating an unfriendly work environment) and the Charlotteville terrorism as being manifestations of the same principle?

The principle being "The only Real Human Beings are white men".

As a woman (and a person with a disability) I tend to find this somewhat frightening. I find it more frightening when people treat all of this as some kind of intellectual exercise, rather than the very real attempt at dehumanisation, at objectification and at rationalisation for actual violence it is. As a woman who would have had to fight to have her very humanity recognised a century ago, I find this reversion to a perceived historical mean to be deeply frightening. I can't imagine how upsetting it must be for people of colour in the USA, and for indigenous people here in Australia to be seeing this.

We need to speak up. We need to speak out. We need to oppose this principle in all its manifestations - in the supposedly "civil" ones like the Damore "memo" (query: how "civil" is a multiple page ramble which boils down to "I am not willing to behave in a respectful way toward a large number of my co-workers and managers because I don't think they're Real Human Beings like me, and I strongly believe I shouldn't have to work alongside them"?); in the virulently obvious ones like the Charlotteville march. In all its manifestations, in every space (including the police forces, the public service, the private sector and the rhetoric of our politicians) we need to oppose this principle, because we have seen what happens when it is allowed to run free. We have seen it in so many different circumstances - in the extermination camps of Germany; in the slavery of the American South; in the so-called "off-shore processing" camps on Nauru and Manus Island; in the Intervention; in the massacres down through the ages; in the Trail of Tears; in all the little slings and arrows of colonialism, of racism, of sexism. We know this principle is socially toxic.

So why do we keep allowing people to spout it as though firstly, it's something new and radical, and secondly, as though it's a valid point of view?

The bits of Twitter I follow have been exploding in about twenty-seven different directions regarding "Peeple for People".

This article pretty much sums up what it's all about:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/09/30/everyone-you-know-will-be-able-to-rate-you-on-the-terrifying-yelp-for-people-whether-you-want-them-to-or-not/

"Yelp for People" is pretty much the elevator pitch version of the idea. According to their FAQs, they largely envision it being used by folks to be all positive and caring and nice about people they know (in the same way Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook are at present). Which, I think, says it all.

Essentially, this is how it would work - someone wants to 'review' you, and so long as they fulfil the conditions, they can do so. What kinds of conditions? They have to be over twenty-one, and have a Facebook account. They need to know your name, the city you live in, and your phone number (or know a phone number they can say is yours). Then they can create a profile for you, if you don't already have one, and publish 'reviews' of you. If someone posts a negative review of you, that review will get texted to your phone number (or to the phone number Peeple has for you) and the onus is on you to respond to that reviewer within forty-eight hours and see whether you can "change a negative to a positive".

(Those of you who are busy attempting to beat yourselves unconscious by head!desk-ing, I sympathise.)

What possible problems could there be? Well, let's start with the idea that *there are more checks on, and privacy for, the person who is leaving the rating* than there are for *the person who is being rated*. From the way I understand things, if I had an iPhone, a Facebook account which said I was over twenty-one, and a plausible mobile phone number, I could conceivably create a Peeple profile for Santa Claus. (I'd love to see whether one of the "thousands" of beta testers they're bragging of actually does this, by the bye. Bonus points if the profile is created by the Easter Bunny). Let's continue with this: once you have had a profile created for you on Peeple, you can't get it deleted - they're thinking about adding this feature in future. They don't have a privacy policy up as yet (that's coming once they release the app). Once your profile is authenticated, app users are able to see both positive and negative reviews for you, and you have no way of removing that profile.

Even getting off the internet altogether won't protect you from these negative reviews.

(Meanwhile, the people behind the app started the day with a locked Twitter account - which they've since unlocked to a degree; have taken steps toward getting a parody account mocking them on Twitter deleted; and are said to be deleting non-positive comments on their Facebook accounts. Nice for some, clearly.)

The system as it is described at present is wide open to abuse by stalkers, abusers, online hate mobs or just people who are feeling malicious on a particular day. It's all the worst possible social aspects of high school, pulled onto the internet and made international.

You can read their version of the story here:

http://forthepeeple.com/#story