#binary thinking

It's not because I don't care about stuff that doesn't affect me directly or just about some activist movements that I'm going to throw hate around or whatever.

(from wikipedia)

Also that shades of grey exist does not mean black and white does not exist. That you have 0, 0.1, 0.2, 0.3 etc up through 1, does not mean you don't have 0 and 1, it's simply that you don't collapse the gradient into it's extremes. There certainly are cases of black and white - like robbing a bank for shits and giggles is wrong, there is no grey area. But it's also uninteresting because there is no need to dissect it further.

Even when one example starts to make progress, it just becomes like another binary. Even gender wise, it becomes nonbinary vs binary, where nonbinary is treated as one concrete identity shared by everyone in that group.

Humans do not fit into binaries! There are so many of us! You can’t separate everyone into boxes and then expect everyone to fit the box perfectly, even if there is more than two boxes. We are complex! We are nuanced! We are what like 8 billion people with different lives and bodies and experiences, and we don’t know everything!

Binaries and boxes are nice and simple and keep us from thinking to hard or getting overwhelmed, but relying on them to the point that, at least so much of American society, relies on them is so harmful and not useful. It’s become a means of separating people and erasing individuals.

It’s even got to the point where people think science proves binaries even when more updated science is saying that it doesn’t. Science is always affected by societal expectations and political ideas, but that is the thing. Yes, modern science can be affected by modern ideologies, but that was true in the 1900s and 1800s and basically since people studied science. Just because a textbook in your highschool in the 80s said something doesn’t mean it’s true! And yes, even now science might not have the full picture, and therefore not fully and always true, but science generally moves forward and betters itself.

But if you take so many observations and experiments from different fields of science that all pretty much say the same thing, and you deny it (I.e binaries/strict categories not being very applicable to a lot of things, like sex and gender, etc.) maybe you are a little more biased than science is.

Adam-Troy Castro ·

Somebody who just saw BLADE RUNNER for the first time discovered, as no one ever has before, that the escaped replicants are slaves and that Deckard is a bad guy serving an evil cause for a corrupt society.

And it honestly makes no difference to me that she was seeing the film for the first time and making these critical judgments for the first time, but I grimace uncomfortably at the position that this subtext is hers to find as an indictment of the original Baby Boomer audience that didn't know any better.

As if the movie itself didn't happen to wear its attitudes toward this situation on its sleeve.

Look, folks, those of you encountering these iconic works for the first time: some of them were very smart. They were nuanced and they were sometimes deliberately self-contradictory. They were made by people who could keep two ideas in their head at the same time and thought you were bright enough to keep two ideas in your head at the same time.

And so, these are not startling discoveries, though I have read posts and essays where various feti took the position that these were things that no one recognized at the time.

Yes, BLADE RUNNER knew Deckard was shooting slaves in the back, and wanted you to shift your empathy to the Rutger Hauer character. It was inherent in the material. They were aware of it. It wasn't the product of old people who were so blind they didn't know.

Similarly, comma, the people who made THE FRENCH CONNECTION knew that Popeye Doyle was a foul-mouthed racist and not a paragon human being. They were aware of it. They expected you to be aware of it. It wasn't the product of old people who were so blind they didn't know better.

Further, the guys who made THE SEARCHERS knew that John Wayne's character was a brutal and racist uncivilized lug with no place in civilization. John Wayne was playing unsympathetic protagonists as far back as RED RIVER. You were supposed to get this.

The people who made THE APARTMENT were well aware that Shirley MacLaine's character was being cruelly exploited and that Jack Lemmon's ambitious young exec was betraying his better nature by helping to support it; and that is the engine of his entire arc, and hers, and that it why the makers of that film did not "hate women," as you claimed. You were supposed to get it.

(And yes, this applies to 3 BILLBOARDS too. The makers of the movie knew that Sam Rockwell's character was a terrible cop and they did not give him a full redemption arc, only a change in direction.)

Third Option, by Karma Chameleon

Content: Rated G.

Medium: Physical game. One page of instructions.

Length: A few minutes.

About: "Third Option is a simple game about reaching outside the options you're given. It takes the form of a conversation (written, spoken, or otherwise), and requires no extra materials. Recommended as an icebreaker, idle distraction, or grounding exercise."

Vibe: Thoughtful, playful.

Curator's note: The game doesn't mention genders outside of the male/female binary, but personally I think it's ideal for getting that idea across, and for sharpening the skill of thinking outside of other boxes.