Sven Slootweg @joepie91@pixie.town

@Peetz0r It would be a very good integration then

@anthropy (Taking into account especially that many forms of violence are not easily recognizable if you are not the affected party)

@anthropy Aggression is definitely a thing to use wisely. But even with the 'violence evokes violence' issue, there are still situations where it is strategically the best option; particularly those where (some form of) violence is already the known outcome regardless of what you do. There's no extra cost to aggression in those cases, and often quite a bit of effect to be gained.

That's not all situations either, but it does apply to depressingly many of them when you are marginalized...

@anthropy I'm not saying you can't or shouldn't take this approach, to be clear! If you feel that you can afford the time and energy to do so, that is completely fine and I encourage it.

The background for my response here is the long-running problem where marginalized folks, who have often been organizing and campaigning for years or decades, are being constantly tone-policed by (mostly privileged) folks with no skin in the game and no experience, telling them that they are being "too aggressive, you won't achieve anything that way" (when they have very good reason to believe otherwise).

And that tone-policing is basically always backed by exactly these beliefs, and an "everybody knows that..." insinuation to go along with it. That is not the fault of any one specific person, but it does make it necessary to provide some pushback against this belief where it pops up.

@anthropy As a marginalized person you will get violent pushback regardless of how compassionate you are, frankly

@anthropy This simply isn't true, in my experience. Explaining with compassion *appears* to be more effective, that much is true, but there is a big difference between apparent effectiveness and true effectiveness.

The problem with systemic discrimination is that it is impossible to address on an individual scale, because - by definition - the discriminated party is at a power disadvantage, and they both have less energy to spend and need to use more of it to argue their case than someone who is in favour of the systemic discrimination.

"Explaining with compassion" essentially fits into this category; it is a very high-energy-demand approach that, at best, convinces a single person to act somewhat better (and rarely enough to matter). This can never work at scale.

Which leaves the option of fighting against it on a societal level. And *that* requires aggressive pushback, it requires the use of 'power amplifiers', to make the systemic discrimination socially unacceptable. And the single most effective way to do that is... confrontation.

It will *appear* less effective because it makes people dislike you on a personal level. But on a societal level, the message (and underlying social norms) absolutely stick a lot better than with the compassionate approach.

As for law, it absolutely is not neutral by any stretch of the imagination. It is defined and enforced by the dominant ideology, which usually is an oppressive one, because that is what centralized power attracts and optimizes for. It only *looks* neutral if you fall into the demographic which those laws were designed to serve.