=AtG=

Today seems to be a good day for finding people who are really on point. This time, we have Kat Blaque on internet comments sections:

In general, comments sections tend to be a massive time-suck that often results in fighting with total strangers and resolving absolutely nothing.

…

That’s one of the reasons I started discussing social justice on my Youtube page. Now I have one definitive video exploring my opinion on a subject, and I feel like something productive has finally come from all my previous frustration.

I encourage you to check her out. She’s right about a lot of stuff, and was one of the most convincing responders to the whole “Rachel Dolezal’s race scam is like trans people” codswallop.

I can’t necessarily formulate a comments policy on AtG just yet, because it’s not my own space–I’m renting New Frontier with two other authors and as far as I can tell, the three of us are collectively responsible for curating comments on this column. That means we have a scattered comments dictatorship right now. But a lot of her experiences with the comments section reflect my own, and inform the comments policy I will formally implement when AtG gets its own space. In a nutshell? We’re not here to convince those who have made up their mind. This blog is for the curious, those who are actively seeking new information, the ones who admit there might be more to learn than what they know, the ones committed to trans allyship who also know what it means to be an ally. Those are the people we’re actually going to reach here.

The main reason we don’t try to convince people who’ve made up their mind is because it seldom works over an internet platform, even less so in the comments section. That’s the sort of thing you do in person. It’s not that I don’t want to encourage you to find ways to resist oppression from the privileged and ignorant–it’s that the privileged and ignorant don’t explicitly seek out social justice blogs to have a conversation about social justice, they do it to specifically derail conversations about social justice.

Unless you happen to be an emergency responder, you probably don’t get paid to clean up train wrecks.

So don’t.

-Shiv