packbat | kyriarchy and subpersonhood

There's a "no more turing tests" tag now.

This might be kinda obvious but we'll just stick it here anyway. Also, shoutout to acorn_squash, who made a perceptive comment about disability and neurodivergence in the last post.

We started our personal-baggage post about personhood by noting that:

kyriarchy talks about "person" vs. "not person" like it's the supreme distinction - people matter, everything else either matters to people or is nothing

...and thinking about it, the entire concept of "intelligence" is just an extension of this dichotomy. It turns a split of "person" vs. "not person" into a scale, from genius to intelligent to ordinary to stupid to primitive to animal to plant to simple dead matter, where beings and things can be categorized as suits kyriarchy's purposes in the moment. Elon Musk gets categorized as a genius because otherwise he's just a rich asshole throwing his weight around and breaking things. Black people get categorized as primitive because otherwise Black chattel slavery is an atrocity of unimaginable proportions. Indigenous Americans get categorized as primitive because otherwise stealing their land by spreading smallpox, burning down villages, tearing up treaties, and so forth is a genocide. Disabled people get categorized as stupid because otherwise there's no moral justification for forcing them prove they should be allowed to scrape out an existence.

And it's bullshit, top to bottom. Self-serving justifications used by the powerful so they don't have to feel guilty about throwing their weight around and breaking things.

And it's also nonsense. We ourselves have felt ourselves being suddenly slung from "intelligent" to "inhuman", from being an eloquent and perceptive friend to being a robotic thing. And we're okay with being a robotic thing but we can tell when that's not being said as a compliment - but more relevantly, we were the same thing the whole time. There was no logic in imposing this framework on the conversation, it was just a thing, an idea, that had been done to our friend and came out unexpectedly to hurt things.