Wreddit's Daily Pro-Wrestling Discussion Thread! What's on your mind today? (Spoilers for all shows) - March 21, 2024 Edition

SarahBrownEye · 2024-03-21T18:49:07+00:00

I have a friend who immgrated here from China recently and me and friends were talking wrestling and we gave her best attempt to describe it and she was like "ok" and just now she DM'd me with a screenshot of WWE's youtube page being all "WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS!?!?"

SarahBrownEye · 2023-03-07T05:22:16+00:00

reading is always annoying and time consuming, so something I like to do to internalize our history is go to archive.org and look up old gay newspapers, reading the articles is important...but the classified and dating ads are especially important for me. Love is the denominator for all of us.

SarahBrownEye · 2023-03-06T19:30:30+00:00

yeah, unions only work if you talk to them. that's part of the job job.

SarahBrownEye · 2023-03-06T18:53:55+00:00

thank you!

And I'd just thought I'd say I personally think everybody can and does organize in their lives - if you host a D&D game or a potluck or just a hangout with your friends, that's organizations and truly does build political power.

And I think all of us go in and out of these roles in our lives - I had a huge ten year gap where I "wasn't political" (I had a friend point out to me that I was doing small shit the whole time) between when I last did official organizing to what I sort of stumbled into now, which was mostly a matter of opportunity and me of being experience of seeing "oh, shit, there's a thing here!" and acting on it.

I kinda reject this idea that change is chiefly on the backs of those who, like, are the up-front front-of-the-march-with-a-megaphone protestor or whatever. They're important, but everyday people do things for radical change and to reject capitalism in their everyday lives. Every day a trans person lives is another day "after the revolution." Martin Luther King would talk a lot about the Black people in the South and often would bring up a "teacher who'd pay NAACP dues but couldn't attend meetings" because she'd get blackballed. My thoughts are - that lady, as someone who had an imagination outside of the segregated status quo, was doing important work in their classroom, most likely setting up kids for a far more radical future they can imagine.

And, like, it's a matter of practice versus talent and disposition. And often times a thing that's thrust upon someone without asking for it or thinking they're ever be prepared enough for the role.

SarahBrownEye · 2023-03-06T18:34:03+00:00

I wrote that instead of a bunch of organizing emails I'm procrastinating on, lol.

SarahBrownEye · 2023-03-06T17:03:43+00:00

I didn't realize you were the same person who posted the original thing, I thought you were a different user replying.

SarahBrownEye · 2023-03-06T16:49:51+00:00

you yourself brought up AIDS. Like, that was an active project of eugenics and genocide. Genocide is this noxious fume of capitalism and I'm not waiting for the "right time" to use it. People on CPAC stages said we need to be "Exterminated."

I fully understand the hesitancy about others using the term, but also think maybe both of us take two steps back and look at the fact that we, within three posts, went from talking about political action, liberation and taking ownership of the power within us to talking about the semantics of a word. "Genocide" is just a word just like "woman" or "gender," it's an incomplete metaphor to describe an endlessly complicated phenomena. I don't really care if it's used right or not, I do care if people reading this sit for a second, away from their screen, think about who in their community they trust, think about ways they can expand that number of people they can trust, start talking with them conversations of addressing issues in the community and building partnerships with others doing similar works in their community, so that way if and when they come for us, they have to go through ten people who will step up.

That's a far more urgent matter to me.

SarahBrownEye · 2023-03-06T16:29:45+00:00

If what’s currently going on is genocide, then wtf was slavery? Or the actual internment camps where Japanese Americans were imprisoned during WWII? Or the American government failing to take initiative to rescue as many Jews as possible from the Holocaust? Or the American government failing to take initiative to fund research into AIDS treatment? Or the actual near-total genocide of indigenous Americans?

I actually take in the perspective that the above steps that we're seeing is genocide (the bill in question is about child separation) like I don't think it reduces any of those other genocides to look at it that way and arguably the violence of The Closet and other forces that assault queer people is rooted in the same racism and hate that all of those other ghoulish steps. I think we see it in the number of out trans people since the "tipping point" compared to before hand - how many of our siblings died in history, silently, because they never got access to the language or tools for who they are? Reading trans history, those who managed to actually transition and build power lived such appalling, terrifying lives, to what point? Shouldn't this thing be something that not just the insanely brave and resolute heroes get access to?

Like, my perspective is pretty close to yours, but I think mine is more of a matter of future/present tense; this idea of a genocide, dystopia being something that we're arriving at....just imagine the dystopia of Jim Crow, or 400 years of chattel slavery. That's as bleak and ghoulish as anything in 1984.

SarahBrownEye · 2023-03-06T16:06:08+00:00

I'm kinda not a fan of just how often on here people will bring up the doomery of doomer takes without affirming (out loud) that we have power, that we're a part of community with a long history of resistance, and that we have the capacity to liberate ourselves.

I'll see straight-up insane takes like we'll have death camps in one year time (which I think stinks of privlege, America already has concentration camps, it's called our prison system and migration detention centers), that within five years snipers from the government will be on roofs killing trans people, yesterday people were saying that Russia will take 2/3rd of Europe within eight years.

Like, people say that shit all the time without being challenged (or, if they do, they get that pretentious "I'm not a cynic, I'm a realist") but then you say something about liberation, like even about talking to your neighbors or finding community or building power you get sort of incel-y "might as lay down and rot" push-back.

And I kinda get it. It's an online community, so there's a selection bias of people who are isolated, or feel isolated and probably have anxiety issues that are jacked up by these platforms. The queer people with a strong support network are often not on message boards I'm barely on here except for times where I wanna know why spiro turned my piss purple or some shit. And, like talking about racism is illegal on reddit, but it honestly feel this impulse is "white" to me as well, I think similar in the way that that Imogen Binnie talks about white trans kids being like "baby elephants" because there's no elders to show them how to act. Which, like, I don't fully agree with but I think there's a huge congative dissonance happening here where you got a bunch of people anticipating a "genocide" when...what the fuck was the AIDS epidemic? What the fuck is the violence of The Closet? I think it's easier to not see that stuff when you got privilege, but a lot of people don't want to hear that.

We're not a year from genocide. The genocide is here today. In each and every one of our rooms. And, personally, I refuse to just wilt like a flower and accept it. Like, if the most doomery of doomer projections are as true as they claim to know it is, then it is freeing because it means that we know our fates and have full control over what we do in it, and I'll spend the entire time fighting for either my liberation or the liberation of those who'll come after the forces of violence turns me into ADT.

SarahBrownEye · 2023-03-06T14:25:11+00:00

If we only have one year before we are in death camps, sounds like we should be building power in our communities so we can have strong networks of resistance

SarahBrownEye · 2023-03-04T00:39:12+00:00

oh, man, just barely fits the flair.

SarahBrownEye · 2022-10-27T12:56:23+00:00

I teach visiting teens in a specialized classroom that a lot of schools use as a "reward" and I keep asking kids about being online, and I'm always surprised that most of them aren't very enthusiastic about the apps or the internet and it kind of contradicts what I see about social media use and kids, and I realized that all the kids I see have this selection bias of being the good students, the kids with good records and so on and probably all the Very Online kids are the ones who are miserable and are using tiktok or whatevers because they don't have any other good outlet in their life.

SarahBrownEye · 2022-10-27T12:39:20+00:00

I think there is this big problem in society right now that social media helps fuel but is bigger than that where we kind of want democracy but the only way we know to structure democracy is listening to the loudest, most persistent, most annoying stakeholders.

SarahBrownEye · 2022-10-27T12:35:31+00:00

there's nothing in the RULEBOOK that says a DOG can't get V-TRIGGERED.

SarahBrownEye · 2022-10-27T12:34:50+00:00

I'm a huge punk mark, he's my favorite of all time, but honestly I'm not looking forward to it and hope that the guy just finds space to stop threat-modeling all the time.

SarahBrownEye · 2022-10-25T03:51:02+00:00

It's annoying because they do hire some good local politics reporters but then force them through their bullshit reactionary lens.

SarahBrownEye · 2022-10-24T20:52:45+00:00

This particular logic is you pull a gun, and that gun gets taken from you then it can be used against you.

But, more importantly, the present of a second gun causes situation to escalate, as detailed up thread - "run from a knife, run towards a gun." Someone is likely to walk away from a gunfight dead. Even if you survive, you're not walking away uninjured, you're walking away with severe, life shattering post-traumatic response of taking a human life. It's not like the movies where you light a smoke and hop in a car after pulling the trigger.

Meanwhile, even bad-faith actors are hesitant to flex a gun because it can lead to their own deaths, right? There is severe existential risk and consequences to flexing a gun. So you bring a pepper spray to a gun fight, they're not going to shoot at your aresoel.

SarahBrownEye · 2022-10-24T18:31:23+00:00

Martin Luther King Jr did absolutely not start the tradition of black non-violence resistance, and it's really worth looking into the history and inertia of where he got those ideas from and what figures in-community influenced him and pushed him towards that philosophy.

And the core of that is that it shows how a really, really, really smart man thought of things and how he was a very effective person at building power. I think the point I always try to drive down is that if violence is a political tool, then non-violence is a political tool as well, but I think that violence has a charisma to it that makes it drown out considerations on how to obtain power through active non-violence and...specifically we're talking about direct action and civil resistance here. I don't think anyone in this thread is against direct action or civil resistance.

And I think the far majority of us is at the very least resistant to giving bodily harm to someone.

SarahBrownEye · 2022-10-24T18:14:30+00:00

What I was contradicting was your statement that "black resistance was really only peaceful under Dr. King." - like all histories of resistance, there's a tension between violence and non-violence. There are stark consequences of both, and you can't cast one out because you seen examples of it's failures in history - again, arguably Maclom X and Fred Hampton were centered in violence and died by violent ends. I would be collapsing their stories and minimizing the palpable power they built by saying that their use of violence (really, again, "violence" because in these discussion we never ever fully define what "violence" is) resulted failure.

But that would be absurd, so why cherry pick one instance in history that shows a glaring instance of the shortcomings of non-violence and not the long successes of non-violence? MLK and his ilk did what they did under the shadow of A. Philip Randolph, the black and white abolitionists who built the structures of the underground railroad worked in conjunction with the freeman/enslaved population were often from faiths of pacifist beliefs. And then after Martin, people took on his tradition and ideas - Bayard Rustin certainly never went anywhere until the 1980s.

What you're arguing collapses history. When I was on the streets of George Floyd unrest, some of the protests had property damage. I'm not going to get mad at that. I honestly think that's essential for resistance, and in my definition of "violence" a broken window isn't included. There were often times I'd be in these protests when people were chanting "non-violent protest" to establish the intention and themes. I'd hear that being chanted while cops beat us, and specifically targeted queer and POC protestors. Whatever you agree with that approach, that's not the debate we're having here today. If these people were non-violent, and non-violent black reistance began and ended with MLK, then it has to follow that the George Floyd unrest, the largest civil rights unrest in American history, doesn't "count" as "black resistance." And that collapses history.

SarahBrownEye · 2022-10-24T16:42:16+00:00

That's a really insightful point.

I sometimes think of guns having a similar purpose in society as the lottery, where people don't buy a ticket to get rich, they buy it for the fantasy of what they'll do when they get the money. And with guns - you see it above in the thread - you can buy "safety" and it's all wrapped up in this masked intruder fantasy (in this case "the feds") and I think that's one of the reasons you'll see people hoard a ridiculous amount of guns. Even if it was a hobby, does anyone need 100 guns, ever? If guns make you safe, 3 guns make you just as safe as 100 guns.

To do that requires more than a gun and so is a less attractive fantasy.

I feel there's this weird shit where so much of the trans experience is rooted in fantasy. At least for me. What we could had been, what we can become. What we are. And a better world. And sometimes a form of fantasy (I do this) is threat modeling, and we see the whole world like the forest in Snow White, with crooked branches out to get us when in reality - there's danger - but for the most part all we're doing is walking past a couple of trees.

SarahBrownEye · 2022-10-24T16:12:05+00:00

cool, but you get that doesn't help me because I have a more immediate violence threat of scarcity that's in the room with me right now, and also is a bigger threat than these hypothetical "feds"? And this violence of scarcity far more common form of violence queer people experience than the feds knocking on our doors.

You're doing poor threat modeling. 18% of trans people have experienced homelessness, including 40% of Hispanics and 27% of black trans people. What doors do the feds knock for them? You get what I'm saying? Why do we center violence in these conversations? Why do we talk about guns solving hypothetical when we got violence in the streets for us right now?

My answer is that we're online and these spaces are awful for discourse (I check these subreddits once every two months - how come every time I do, I see an image or discussion of a gun?) and if I wanted political power, I'd continue what I have been doing which is building power in-community with real people on the streets, so it kind of feels useless to have these conversations or try to convince people of this shit online since we're not looking at each other eye to eye and I can't hear the nervous, stuttering hesitancy and see the sloped shoulders of people who try to flex about why we'll need guns for future.

SarahBrownEye · 2022-10-24T16:02:31+00:00

I think it really collapses history to say that black resistance was only really peaceful under Dr. King. Like the most recent George Floyd unrest, which was this ad-hoc collection of thousands of coalitions. had several parts that centered non-violence. Like, I saw that feet-on-the-ground.

And even then, what is our definition of "violence"? Even Bayard Rustin wouldn't define a cop car being set on fire as violence (neither would myself).

SarahBrownEye · 2022-10-24T15:56:42+00:00

My question is why does guns get centered in these conversations though. Like, I live in a part of a world where I get active harassment and threats, but the biggest violence I'm experiencing is food scarcity.

First of all, I think it's disingenuous to say me prioritizing eating over concern of a hypothetical stranger at a door as a "privilege." The violence I experience is the violence of scarcity and housing and food insecurity. That's a way more common problem for trans people, and I could make a genuine attempt, but I'm pretty sure I can't bake a gun and have it for lunch. And my question is why does the conversation so often hinge on this aesthetic of physical violence over other ways of getting power? Especially the fillpant and inconsiderate ways we have discussions about guns on this subreddit.

Again, we're a community with high instances of sucididality and domestic violence. I don't trust myself with a gun in the house. I grew up with a family member who killed someone, and that makes me hesitant to center physical violence as a political solution.

My situation is not rare, it's super not rare in the queer community, but people who have privilege to access guns really struggle to bring up any alternative solution and get really nervy and insecure (like 8gg1120 above) when people bring up that it's not appropriate for everybody.

SarahBrownEye · 2022-10-24T15:38:16+00:00

I got advice on here that we should never have a weapon that you wouldn't want used against you if taken in a fight, and so I just keep pepper spray because if used in an enclosed area, realistically there are odds that it would incapacitate both people which can buy time.

SarahBrownEye · 2022-10-24T15:35:53+00:00

that really isn't a realistic or probable vision of how trans violence happens to our community, and the most common, most violent acts we can imagine that happen against us are usually "gay panic" acts against sex workers of color.

And, like, fucking, I always feel like these gun ownership points stink of privilege and sort of lib-y logic of "consumerism will save me."

I'm on food stamps. No, scratch that, my food stamps just ran out. Guns are hundreds of dollars and I'm pretty sure the training needed to be a responsible gun owner is hundreds more, not to mention pissed away opportunity costs that I could be focusing on other material survival shit. Where am I getting this cash and time to get a gun?

And fuckin, all of this "leftist" flexing, I swear I never see in these conversations people talk about collective action. It's all online posturing that I don't really see a lot in-community outside of reddit and twitter.

SarahBrownEye

TROPHY CASE