Well, that was surreal.

[conuly]

I don't think I've ever been 100% in the right before.

http://vintage-ads.livejournal.com/4187577.html

Apparently, it is wrong to tell people you were offended, it is wrong to explain why somebody else might be offended, it is wrong to know more about holidays or (to judge from the deleted comment) DST than the moderator or share information that might be useful or interesting on... wild leap here, probably ANY subject, it's wrong to reply calmly to other people as they get more and more hysterical, it is wrong (deleted comment again) not to snark back at somebody who just attacked you, and it's wrong to have trouble reading the aforementioned hysterical comments. I will concede to misreading one of the first comments I replied to, but it really is hard to find the words through a smokescreen of redundant question marks and exclamation points. Honestly, I wouldn't let Eva put that many in a paragraph! Refusing to throw a tantrum is way more trollish than yelling and screaming, I guess. And in this bizarro world, keeping your cool and trying to explain your position is both more offensive and more signaling that you "enjoy" being offended than throwing a screaming hissy fit and insulting anybody who disagrees with you. Plus, it's wrong.

It's probably also wrong to rejoin a comm after being removed, but at least that taught her the difference between remove and ban : )

It's a pity, because despite the fact that half the comm refuses to use lj cuts it's actually a fun resource. Gone, forevermore, because some people would rather wallow in their own ignorance. (I never used that phrasing, but now I think I ought to have. I always love a chance to accuse people of wallowing in their own ignorance. I love the image it brings up. And if you can get banned for saying things like "Halloween wasn't widespread until relatively recently" you might as well have more fun first.)

Is it wrong to see if anything interesting is happening on the DW mirror? I wouldn't join in if it is, just... read.

Comments

[dragonwolf]

It looks to me (based on what's still visible) like lack of understanding why people might be offended by something she said might be a trigger of hers, especially when the things she said were, in fact, being twisted (intentionally or not) by not just one, but two people.

As someone who faces that exact trigger, that situation is extraordinarily frustrating, anxiety-inducing, and downright terrifying as you question your sanity, and if you aren't at the point that you can recognize that it's happening, while it's happening, you end up making things worse in a sincere and concerted effort to make things better.

And to be fair, she asked multiple times for an explaination of exactly what it was that made it offensive other than that it was a Native American man wearing a headdress. It also wasn't until you joined in that she really started escalating and went off the deep end (which is why I think part of her trigger is the feeling of being outnumbered and essentially trapped).

I'm actually kind of surprised that you, of all people, didn't recognize the chain of events as a Theory of Mind breakdown. Both you and bas have a rather "I shouldn't have to tell you, it should be obvious" tone to your posts and never actually explain what it is that makes it so offensive - particularly when viewed in light of the actual facts, and not the distorted versions that resulted from twisting misstia's words around like a pretzel. How did you manage to construe "as far as I know, that is an actual Native American..." as "it is not offensive to post stereotypical pictures of Native Americans (or Indians) so long as the person in the picture is really just pretending"?

That by no means excuses her escalation (and I genuinely think she should get help for that, for her own sake), but I believe it does explain it and help to understand why she reacted the way she did.

On a side note, it seems the abuse of punctuation and capitalization is the way she normally writes. If her comments there made your eyes bleed, don't look at her journal.

And finally, for a potentially stupid question - how is a non-Native American being offended by a picture of a Native American in a headdress any different than a neurotypical being offended by the use of the term "autistic"?

[atalantapendrag.livejournal.com]

Ugh, misstiajournal is really insufferable!

[conuly]

I know!

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

Meh. Tempest in a teapot. Trick-or-treating isn't "only a few decades old" - I personally have trick-or-treated for over half a century now, and my parents who were born in 1926 trick-or-treated as children too.

Trick-or-treating—going from house to house in search of candy and other goodies—has been a popular Halloween tradition in the United States and other countries for an estimated 100 years. (http://www.history.com/topics/history-of-trick-or-treating)

The whole Native American thing has gotten so out of hand that anyone who isn't Native enough to be registered with the BIA really does best to keep their hands off, and their pie-holes shut about ANY Native-related matter, whether they are pro or con. If Miss Whatsis's grandmother was full-blood Seneca, Miss Whatsis is Native in the eyes of the BIA and it's unwise to contradict her about anything related to the Native folk, no matter how wrong she may be.

However, the world is full of people going around claiming to be "part Native" on the basis of wishful thinking or unsupported family legends, who may or may not have any actual Native blood, and certainly have no connection with any bona fide Tribal group. (Tribe is a Big Deal where I live - a lot of the local Tribes don't get along so well, and being "Native' counts for nothing; it's all about whether you're S'k'lallum, Quileute, Suquamish or Makah.) The bona fide Native folk REALLY hate it when "white guys" try to speak for them, and they hate it most when 'white guys' play the Native Ancestry card. Heh, long ago this Lakota guy told me that when someone claims to be one-sixteenth Cheyenne, what they were really saying was that their great-grandmother was a whore.

If someone with a BIA card has a problem with the way the image of someone Native is used, that someone can say something about it. A person who is not herself Native doesn't have any business piping up, and in fact is risking getting smacked down hard by somebody who is actually Native. Obviously, if an image is derogatory or insulting, it's only right for anyone to object, regardless of what group is being insulted: meanness and mockery are always objectionable.

But this whole 'misappropriation' thing? Tell you what, it is misappropriation for any person who ain't a card-carrying genetically-certified Injun to even go there at all, and never leads to anything but trouble. It's not like being gay, disabled or autistic, which anyone can be. It's not even like being black or Jewish - the Native folk here are still on their own ancestral land, still distinctively Tribal, and with them it's all about the Native blood.

I have none of it at all, so I just leave them alone. I don't particularly oppose them (except the Makah whale-hunting) but I don't support them either; I don't "misappropriate" images of them, but neither do I buy their artwork; I don't copy their ceremonies, but neither do I attend their open-to-the-white-public tourist events. In my opinion, Tribal thinking is bigoted - I don't want to support people who look down on me because of my ancestry; my ancestors weren't even on this continent when theirs were being conquered - and it's also counter-productive.

One of the biggest advantages the Native folk have is that all us little white (and black) kiddies grew up thinking the Indians were cool. Yes, the whole Noble Savage thing is a literary tradition - Mark Twain wrote a whole lot about that. But still, yay, Indians... right? Only now it's 'misappropriation' for non-Native kids to play Indian, or watch movies about Indians, or try to practive Indian arts.

*shrugs* When the white and black kids stop thinking it's cool to be Indian, the Native kids are going to stop thinking so too. So much for preserving an archaic cultural tradition by trying to restrict its practice to only the descendants of the original culture. But I'm a 'white chick', and their business is none of mine.

[conuly]

Re: TorT:

Sure, it's been around, but it wasn't universally widespread or accepted. And on the converse, just because it is declining in some areas, it is mistaken to conclude that no kids at all in the US trick or treat "the way we used to". It's a big damn country.

As far as the native thing goes, you're conflating two different commenters. There's room for reasonable people to have differing opinions, but the word there is "reasonable". First part of which is you don't assume people are personally attacking you just because they have another view.

Of course, this all confirms what I try to pretend I don't believe, which is that sometimes this whole "manners" thing is overrated. They never seem to work on the people I try them on. I ought to just say what I think more often, which I used to do. I didn't get better results, but I got them a lot faster.

[dandelion.livejournal.com]

misstiajournal has always been a bit of an immature brat. Despite being twice the age of most LJ users.

[conuly]

And had I known that, I could've saved some time by jumping to the end there.

[eofs.livejournal.com]

It's a stupid quote, anyway. The blanket's just the same length, sure. But if before it went from your nose to your ankles, now it goes from your shoulders and your feet aren't cold. I don't think anyone actually believes you extend the length of the day, you just change which parts of it you do in the daylight. I can't wait for the clocks to go forward, as for the first time since September I'll leave work in the daylight. (Sod's law, I'll probably be on a 2245 finish that day - but the next day I'll enjoy it.) That's always one of my favourite days of the working year.

I don't understand how people get so thrown by moving in and out of DST. Do they never, ever change their bedtime or waking time? Do they never cross state/country borders into another timezone? The switch between UK and Germany sometimes throws me a little, but no more than going to bed an hour late or getting up an hour early would. I know jet lag you're supposed to get over at a rate of roughly 1 hour per day - so how people get thrown for a week simply by moving in or out of DST I do not understand.

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

"It's a stupid quote, anyway. The blanket's just the same length, sure. But if before it went from your nose to your ankles, now it goes from your shoulders and your feet aren't cold."

Well-said!

I get drastically thrown out of whack moving in and out of DST. It has nothing to do with sleeping/waking - I have no Circadian rhythms worth mentioning, and no externally-determined schedule, so whether I'm waking up at dawn or going to bed then is mostly random. But this makes it REALLY disconcerting when the light in the sky suddenly doesn't match the clock any more - and yes, it takes about a week to get used to the change.

It's not just disconcerting at waking and bedtime, either. It's disconcerting all day long; even more so when the day is overcast (as our March days usually are) so that the Sun's position can't actually be seen. What this leads to is days of low-level anxiety from feeling late when one is actually on time. You've probably heard of 'cognitive dissonance' - this is perceptual dissonance, and knowing that that's what it is doesn't make it any easier to cope with.

Jet lag is not the same thing at all. I've never gotten jet lag in my life; it feels perfectly natural that time-zones change as one moves around the Earth. It feels weird, wrong and totally artificial (which, of course, it is) for one's time-zone to arbitrarily be changed twice a year when one has not gone anywhere.

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

Widespread and accepted enough; apparently it was quite a big deal throughout much of the country in the 1930's, which was when my parents were doing it in small-town eastern Nebraska. Apparently the 'tricks' were at least as important as the 'treats' back then, and they were quite ingenious - LOL, my brother and I heard about a lot of them, but of course WE were never allowed to even soap windows or throw toilet paper. (Phooey).

My first trick-or-treat was in 1960, in suburban San Jose, where it was a very big deal. My sisters are 10 and 7 years older than me, and trick-or-treat had been a big deal for them in Kansas and Tennessee before I was born; I've seen the pictures of their costumes each year. When we moved to suburban New Jersey in 1966, trick-or-treat was an unbelievably HUGE deal - every kid went, every house was lit up, decorated and giving out treats till midnight or later.

No, I really don't think anybody does still trick-or-treat the way we used to. Back in the day, the costumed children hit the streets at sundown, and there were no grown-ups anywhere - almost no teenagers, even; there was a huge taboo against going trick-or-treating after about age 14. Street after street after street after street, all night long - nobody but children out, and none of this modern sissy business of being driven from house to house, either. It was magical.

These days, of course, the whole thing is spoiled by the herds of parents hanging around in their tedious mundane coats while their kids go up to the doors, chatting with each other, directing and cautioning and just being a gigantic bring-down in general. They could at least have the grace to put on a costume, even if only a silly hat or something, but no; there they are, blatantly contravening the whole spirit of Halloween.

Show me a community where all the parents can bring themselves to allow their grade-schoolers to run free and unsupervised in the dark Autumn streets till midnight and eat as much candy as they want one night a year, and I'll say trick-or-treat as I once knew it is not yet gone from the world. I don't believe there is one, though; people are too paranoid these days.

I don't actually think I'm conflating two different commenters on the native thing. What I think I'm doing is (impartially) disagreeing with all the commenters, because I think everyone involved in that little kerfuffle was just about equally wrong. However, I'm not arsed to go back and check, because I can't see that it makes any difference. It's like that old saying, "Opinions are like assholes; everybody's got one, and some of them stink" - non-Natives can argue with other non-Natives as much as they like over their opinions about Native stuff, but it's never going to win them any Political Correctness Points with the actual Natives.

[marveen.livejournal.com]

Here we got a couple dozen kids (pretty much all that live in walking distance). The under-fives were escorted by parents.

The second wave was alone or in pairs, ages about seven to twelve or so, and costumed.

The third wave was teenagers wearing street clothes with a smear of "blood" somewhere, in groups. When asked, they announced themselves to be zombies.

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

That sounds like a pretty traditional Trick-or-Treat - are you in a small town, or a suburb, or what?

I get the impression that trick-or-treat got its first big popularity in the small towns of the Midwest in the '30's - it really is a 'town thing', doesn't work so well in either the city or the country. But it was the vast suburban tracts of the Baby Boom where it took on a much larger scope: miles and miles of streets of houses, three to six children in almost every house - so every house was getting several hundred trick-or-treaters.

[marveen.livejournal.com]

We're in one of those weird little clusters that is a suburb without an urb. ;-) It's a small housing development six miles from the city limits and two or three miles to the next cluster.