Jessica Price

Heh, don’t get me started on the fandomization of everything. At this point, I don’t think more than four people who like a thing should ever be allowed to talk about it at a time. :-P

You seem deeply invested in the idea of her as malicious. I don’t need evidence of intent to point to harm.

I love TikTok! It's full of incredibly talented people, I find out about new science before I see it anywhere else, etc.

Video is powerful, which can also make it dangerous.

uh, well, that's dark:

"These populations, Kelly said, are more "biddable" if they are suffering from sleep deprivation. "You’re totally out of it," he explained, according to The Telegraph. "Sleep deprivation is a torture.""

Sleep Scientist Says Starting Work At 10 A.M. Is What Nature Intended Getting up any earlier is basically torture.

In unrelated news, fellow night owls, we are VINDICATED: www.huffpost.com/entry/what-t...

Yup. The US might not help Palestine if it’s a centrist democracy, but it DEFINITELY is not going to help Palestine as a fascist dictatorship, so

YIKES

Thread 😬

I also think that making Palestine their only issue was a morally “clean” way for a lot of people to disclaim any responsibility for having to help the person sitting next to them put on their oxygen mask.

My suspicion is that A) there’s an op of some sort going on by forces that saw Palestine as a convenient wedge issue, and B) the sort of leftism that’s succeeding on TikTok is tankie authoritarian leftism over, you know, labor leftism/anarchism/etc.

Which makes it easy for the right to co-opt.

The willingness of TikTok leftists to stand shoulder to shoulder with open Nazis in order to shut up Black women saying “you shouldn’t be willing to sacrifice Black/trans/immigrant/disabled people in the US to theoretically punish Democrats for Palestine” was like

uhhh something is deeply off here

And if you’re arguing with a Black person and a white supremacist sidles up and starts agreeing with you, priority one is telling the white supremacist to fuck off, because they are NOT AND NEVER WILL BE, unless they disavow being a white supremacist, community. They are just… poison.

To me, someone who grew up in a Clinton liberal family, the question has an obvious answer: you are not in community with open white supremacists, ever, even if you are aligned on some specific issue.

You are not going to coalition-build with alt-righters. They are not fellow travelers.

They seemed perfectly happy to leverage pressure from the right as well as the left to try to shut up anyone who was saying it, and often *especially* when the person saying it was Black (or trans).

And that, to me, speaks to who they’re willing to be in community with.

Like, I saw very little of the supposed leftists doing what you’d (hopefully) expect, which would be to say, hey, I also disagree with her, but I’m not okay with seeing a dude with 1488 in his profile name call her a monkey, fuck off, Nazi scum, we’re not on the same side.

And there were a lot of them being very vocal about hey, this “if you’re talking about domestic issues in this election instead of Palestine, you’re a Zionist” attitude is highly sus.

And they just got *dogpiled.*

And I’m watching self-IDed leftists in their comments agreeing with alt-righters.

You have less power to affect Israeli policy about Palestinians than you do to affect American policy about Black and queer and immigrant and disabled people in the US, and you put the oxygen mask on yourself and the person sitting next to you first.

Black women on TikTok were talking very explicitly about community: your first responsibility is to your vulnerable neighbors, because *they are the people you have the most power to affect.*

The degree to which that restraint had just vanished among the TikTok left was kind of shocking to me, an Old.

But I don’t think it was just pearl-clutching. Who you’re willing to respectfully disagree with is shorthand for who you’re interested in being in community with.

Like if you won’t do it because you genuinely believe you should, having that additional restraint of “but I will *look* bad” is kind of how societies deal with the fact that people aren’t empathetic to their neighbors all the time, and I’m in favor of backup systems.

But I also think, given <waves at history, current events, everything> that having societal norms where, if you’re a white person, even if you’re marginalized in other ways, you need to think twice about *how* to publicly disagree with a Black woman to minimize harm is good, actually.

I don’t think Oprah is malicious, but I do think she should be publicly answerable for the number of alt-right grifters she’s mainstreamed, for example.

And look, I am not saying I think we should have a society where no one is ever allowed to publicly disagree with a Black woman. There are Black women who have obtained enough power and influence to do harm at scale and have chosen to do some harm at scale with it, and we need to be able say that.

And by the time we got close to the election, the main way I could tell the difference between the only-Palestine-matters leftists and the alt-righters was whether they were using “clever” filter-passing ways to say the n-word.

Beyond that, the rhetoric was largely the same.

Like, you don’t feel obligated, as a leftist, to take that claim from people within a VERY marginalized community seriously and respectfully, even if you think there are issues that should take higher priority?

Even if you don’t really care, you’re comfortable with how that looks?

…that yelling at people for voting Harris, trying to get people not to vote or to vote third-party, is abandoning Black communities to what we all know Trump is going to do to them?

for… Palestine, somehow?

Like, you’re comfortable dogpiling Black women for saying that?

Like, I don’t know if it was good or bad, it just *was.*

So half a decade later, I’m watching this go down on TikTok and I’m just like ok even if you sincerely believe somehow that Harris would be worse for Palestinians than Trump, you’re a white person comfortable mocking Black women for saying…

And some of it came from “as a white person yelling at a Black person about politics, I’m likely to look like a racist bully, so I’m just going to… not engage.”

This isn’t to say it never happened, and it wasn’t like there was much open conversation about it, it was just… yeah, nope, avoiding that.

Like, there was a lot of… maybe we let Black women yell at this Black woman that we think is really wrong on this issue.

I think some of that came from a place of actual ethics: this is a marginalized community, there are real power dynamics at play, so let people from that community speak on it.

…that 5 years ago, at least in my “we’re exasperated with Clinton liberals but we don’t see them as somehow more The Enemy than the people doing literal Nazi salutes” online circles is that it would have been pretty unthinkable to just… openly attack Black women like that.

Cynically: the optics.