Fourth Post!

[hoisinsauce]

btw feel free to suggest/nominate post titles

Post about fandom! Or whatever! Whether it's a rave about some obscure series, or an essay dissecting every last reason why some internet-famous author should rethink their career, someone will probably read it at some point! We also just chat about life.

(start a comment thread by replying to this post)

Comments

Re: How's life?

[(Anonymous)]

Showerthoughts:

Sometimes I think of schools as immunisations. You get a bit of exposure to authoritarianism early in life so that you reject it on the bigger scale later.

I worry about the unintended side effects of trying to model healthy systems to children. Maybe they need to see some really unhealthy systems, too.

Will all these callouts and cancellations turn out to be valuable, by spurring people on to oppose that mindset while the stakes are relatively low?

(I'm reading an article on preventing future zoonotic pandemics and thinking aloud)

Re: How's life?

[(Anonymous)]

Hmm, I agree that some children might react to school that way but I'm not sure that I did. Instead, I learned to depend on adults' approval for a sense of my worth, which took until grad school to dismantle (...fun).

I am also doubtful about the implied idea that special effort needs to be put in to expose children to unhealthy systems. I think that happens a fair amount anyway ... Being exposed to a diversity of models is good, but that's what having friends from different backgrounds and goggling at their family dynamics is for.

Re: How's life?

[(Anonymous)]

DA

I worry about the unintended side effects of trying to model healthy systems to children. Maybe they need to see some really unhealthy systems, too.

Will all these callouts and cancellations turn out to be valuable, by spurring people on to oppose that mindset while the stakes are relatively low?

I wonder. I feel like people don't oppose callouts and cancellations until they're affected or someone they think is innocent is affected. It's like the TERF thing - cancelling TERFs is ok until you realise the TRAs will really call just anyone a TERF, then it matters to you.

I know my own insistence on opposing fandom callout culture and censorship comes directly from watching slash and femslash get reported and censored in early fandom days by Christian fundies. Pity most of fandom doesn't seem to have retained that lesson.

Re: How's life?

[(Anonymous)]

> I know my own insistence on opposing fandom callout culture and censorship comes directly from watching slash and femslash get reported and censored in early fandom days by Christian fundies.

I think mine comes mostly from watching The Crucible as a teen and learning about HUAC + reading memoirs from people living in various auth regimes ruled by extremists. I was also aware of the history of fandom purges but they didn't hit my corner of fandom directly. So my brain always goes straight to the most stressful examples haha.

> Pity most of fandom doesn't seem to have retained that lesson.

I think they retained an incomplete one, ie: "censoring gay stuff is bad". But that's as far as they go and that's as far as they think the problem goes.

Re: How's life?

[(Anonymous)]

I think mine comes mostly from watching The Crucible as a teen and learning about HUAC + reading memoirs from people living in various auth regimes ruled by extremists. I was also aware of the history of fandom purges but they didn't hit my corner of fandom directly. So my brain always goes straight to the most stressful examples haha.

My country has had a long history of censorship, so I didn't necessarily see the issue with it. (And I only made the connection to The Crucible later, when SJW victim card (I do not know how to describe this, but it's the one where someone makes a long post about being oppressed and victimises, gives you an emotive first person description of how hurt they are, then summons the mob.)) denunciation became a staple.

But my issues started a bit before that because an adjacent fandom to mine experienced purges and the sentiment then was that we were next.

I think they retained an incomplete one, ie: "censoring gay stuff is bad". But that's as far as they go and that's as far as they think the problem goes.

It's a pity really. Because the issue wasn't this - the issue is that we've baked the exception in. It reminds me of the TRA playbook about taking over groups to make decisions favourable to them. A Singaporean friend of mine told me that this is what happened to a feminist group in her country: it was taken over in exactly that way by a Christian group, who felt that anything short of the traditional Christian line was wrong.

The problem is that making general rules that impose on others and that rely on your own righteousness is bad, both because you could be wrong, and because even if you are right, someone less nice taking over will use it to fuck others over.