It's exhausting to feel like we have to have the same conversations Over And Over #onhere.

Musing about how this is because
a) everyone joins the conversation at different times, from different places
b) the same topics remain culturally difficult, or just difficult for humans.

The first I think is self explanatory: someone who's just beginning their journey to unlearn, say, internalized racism, is going to need to do the same work someone who's further along has already faced many times.

(Would that we could all read one insightful thread about systemic oppression--in general or in specific--and go, aha, yes, now I understand everything and am fully aware of all my biases and am now A Good Person™.

Alas that this is not how Literally Anything works.)

Culturally, we're bad at valuing people younger than us (what is "allowed" in YA/YA as valuable; All Millennial Discourse).

We're bad at valuing women (romance, anti-harassment policies, pumpkin spice).

We're bad at boundaries (reviews, tagging, moderation, unsolicited advice).

We're bad at distinguishing personal taste and experience from external value.

(ART, also anything like, x was great for me, and therefore x is great/will work for everybody! As well as 'this person was nice to me, therefore he is nice to everyone and other people are wrong'.)

That one might be a human thing actually, but I can trace a pretty clear connection there with being bad at separating money from value.

(yay capitalism! price is not indicative of value, not everything you create needs to have a price assigned to be legitimate, etc.)

We're bad at valuing time spent that isn't in work, or put another way: how to have agency under capitalism.

(WRITE EVERY SECOND AND BE GRATEFUL, if you're poor it's because you've made bad choices, etc.).

(…important side note: just realized as I'm going that I'm alternating between my parenthetical examples being examples of shitty arguments versus healthier counterarguments, so, uh, sorry for the inconsistency and confusion)

It seems like we OUGHT to be better at power dynamics, given that humans are social creatures?

But we're bad at recognizing shifts, including in other people's perceptions of *our* power--

--like, people who are used to thinking of themselves as the underdog, or less powerful in some context, may not notice that what OTHER people notice is they actually have an enormous platform now, or institutional support, etc.

As HUMANS, though, we're REALLY bad at separating individual from systemic.

(in both directions, actually, but particularly at believing a problem is systemic rather than individual, because systems are big and hard to grasp in any sense--physically, conceptually, etc.;

whereas in the other direction it can be an unwillingness to own up to what we've actually done--which is different than what we imagine we've done, which sometimes is worse but wrong and thus still not useful!).

This is related to humans being bad at grasping huge numbers and scale. I also think we're bad at grasping intangibles--like social systems of oppression--but I'm not sure I've actually read studies on that.

(Maybe that's why we sometimes struggle with power dynamics, actually.)

In further related news we're bad about believing that we're rational actors, when lol we are Super Not.

(By which I mean, not that people are stupid, but the reasons we make choices are not necessarily the reasons we think we make choices.)

We're bad at subjects that aren't binary, and we're bad at not categorizing.

(gender as a spectrum, One True Definition of SF/F, us vs. them framings, attempts to help that result in not-opted-in lists of Jewish writers or mandating pronoun disclosure which can out people...)

This leads us to all kinds of rules lawyering, attempts to find clear delineations, when, I'm sorry, The World Is Complicated and there's no perfect set of rules systems that's going to get around that.

(But also rules systems are not inherently useless.)

Like, 'don't be a jerk' might get you pretty far!

But we still have to make exceptions for, 'but also don't just smile and be polite in the face of fascism!'

(that's not what 'don't be a jerk' means, let us now commence an endless semantic argument over the definition of 'jerk', followed by what it means to 'be' as opposed to 'do' and is there a distinction, the value of generic directives--)

...I'm going to stop there; I refuse to list all the things humans and cultures are bad at forever and how that contributes to our Endless Discourse lol.

My point is there's overlap in a lot of those elements that we struggle with collectively, which is why we keep hearing them.

But The Discourse also isn't irrelevant, even if it's necessarily imperfect because we're all humans.

(All cat contributions are, of course, perfect, because cats are inherently perfect creatures, I will not be taking questions, thank you.)

I'm still not over when last year as a bookseller I started a romance book club at a bookstore that had not had a romance section.

At our first meeting I ended up playing a kind of racism whack-a-mole where I had diplomatically but emphatically shut down shit like--

--'all lives matter' and 'immigrants just aren't like they used to be' and 'I don't see why representation matters' and 'I don't see color'--

yes, ALL OF THOSE in like 15 minutes, I'd shut down one and then another would erupt, I had goddamn whiplash--

--but.

Time on Twitter and The Endless Discourse had weirdly prepared me for all the possible arguments any person was likely to employ on these subjects. I handled it.

I was ABLE to handle it.

Anyway, I still despair when I'm like, oh I see, this conversation we've been having for a million years is apparently still a conversation we have to have, because part of the problem of course is not everyone *wants* to learn.

There are people who believe they are already A Good Person™ and thus while they might be aware they don't know everything, they also believe everything is fine as-is.

But I'm trying to remember that having the same arguments over and over, and The Discourse being relentless, doesn't mean the people are stupid or hopeless and that we're necessarily wasting our time.

Just, some issues are complicated & difficult & deeply and widely entrenched.

So I'm going to scroll past a lot that I don't need, or don't have the spoons to weigh in on, or others in my TL is covering the salient arguments.

But I'm going to remind myself not to lose hope, because broad change takes incremental work and this is actually--

--well, not fine, I guess, and it's not like I'm never going to lose patience or get pissed because there are certainly cases where people should really fucking know better.

But that's not indicative that meaningful change isn't happening or will never happen.

ANYWAY wow that went long, Happy Sunday, enjoy whatever discourse explosions you're participating in today??

(or, like, go pet a cat, it's always a solid life choice unless you're allergic or something)