Posts by Emma Hart
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Hard News: Poor Choices, in reply to ,
My social medium has more frequently been the dinner party where we share where we are in real time and at the same place.
I would love to be able to do this, with the people who mean the most to me. But they live in three different countries, and all over New Zealand, so that's never going to happen. Fortunately for me, they're all on social media.
I am happy to just use forums such as this, which have creative merit
An old friend of mine and I used Twitter to spontaneously co-write a limerick the other day. Different spaces lend themselves to different kinds of creativity. I really want to use Twitter to write a line at a time story now.
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Which is to say, basically, that I agree with pretty much everything everyone is saying here. Bless.
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Hard News: Poor Choices, in reply to Sacha,
intent does matter.
Intent does matter. Intent is not magic. These things are both true.
There is a world of difference between somebody hitting you deliberately, and somebody hitting you by accident. But you'd still want the person who hit you by accident to say, "Oh god, I'm sorry, are you okay?" and not, "Well, you shouldn't have had your head there." Intent matters very much, but it doesn't make your face, or your heart, stop bleeding.
A phrase that Emma uses here – “read kindly” – seems important to me. Reading what the subject has said in the worst possible light rarely ends well. Assuming good faith is better.
Again, this is true, But Also. Reading kindly doesn't mean excusing everything anyone says. Sometimes the best possible light is still pretty fucking dark. It also doesn't mean not being able to criticise - constructively. It's still okay to say, "Did you mean X? Because it kind of sounds like you might mean Y." (Which is also a great way to deal with people who are dog-whistling.)
And this is where Twitter - which I love very dearly, and which has been a life-savingly supportive environment for me - falls down. It doesn't allow space for nuance. The character limit pushes people to telegraph things
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Hard News: Poor Choices, in reply to Russell Brown,
Perhaps it might be better to say “undesirable things that are sometimes said and done in the name of intersectionality.”
Or we could say “call-out culture” and stop pretending it goes one way. The spurious justification might be different, but the behaviour is no different from the sparkle-pony slut-shaming “you get women raped” bollocks people who believe in intersectionality have always been on the receiving end of.
I’ve spent quite a bit of time occupying a ‘between’ position in some of these disputes, and I’ve had it from both sides. It’s no different.
ETA: Ironically, this very issue is one I appear to be smack in the middle of.
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Hard News: Poor Choices, in reply to Bart Janssen,
But we use death to make a point all the time, and rightly so. The key is to use generic issues around death not specific issues about the person.
Yes, exactly.
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Hard News: Poor Choices, in reply to giovanni tiso,
her framing of the issue
I found the piece badly flawed. She repeatedly refers to pile-ons, or call-out culture, as "intersectionality". She may as well call it "cow" for all the sense that makes. Intersectionality is a thing, it's a word that has valuable meaning, and it's the only reason I have anything to do with feminism. I loathe call-out culture, but it's not unique to feminism, let alone third-wave feminism. And I know she makes those points in that column, but she goes on calling it "intersectionality".
I have an acquaintance I hugely admire, because she goes and gets shit done. Her activism is active. And every time she does something, she has to take the flak from a dozen, or a hundred, keyboard warriors who nit-pick her on not being inclusive enough. Now, sometimes in there are grains of legitimate criticism, but man, the temptation to just walk the fuck away...
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Hard News: Poor Choices, in reply to Matthew Poole,
I think the only possible exception would be a public safety campaign, where someone’s death really is the ultimate demonstration of a “xyz behaviour is dangerous” message.
Even then... see, I think about the death of Nayan Woods. One of the things his parents had to endure was people trying to use that death to campaign against boy racers. Even if their point had been valid - it later turned out it wasn't - that was incredibly distressing for people who knew him as a human being and not a data point.
At the least I would say, don't do it while the death is fresh, and don't do it if it's someone you don't know and never met.
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Hard News: Poor Choices, in reply to Richard Aston,
if she acknowledged getting triggered by Charlotte Dawson’s suicide and then stayed talking about her own experience of aging, its a very valid topic
This. Which brings me back to something someone (possibly Lilith, I can't remember) said on Twitter: don't use someone else's death to make your point.
I've poked and poked at this idea, because it can't possibly be that simple and there must be a whole bunch of exceptions, but it stands up pretty well.
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Up Front: Egypt: It's Complicated, in reply to Jackie Spencer,
Aw, thanks Jackie. I'm always a little worried that other people will feel I'm misrepresenting their experience.
And then of course, last night, while I was desperately working on the article on Egypt that's currently consuming my life, the Egyptian government resigned. I was in the middle of a sentence and everything.
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Speaker: TPP: Error Correction, in reply to Kumara Republic,
pretty hard to respond to a column on Twitter.
Oh, if only there were some place other than Twitter where he could respond.