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On Feminist Frequency (link goes to page with video + transcript), there's a video up on the theme of "Tropes vs Women #1: The Manic Pixie Dream Girl".
And ooh, I have issues with it.
Firstly, there's the personal, which will generally hit first before wider considerations of social justice come in to play, I can't deny it. The issue being that while I wouldn't describe myself as anyone's dream girl, the manic pixie thing? That would be me.
To the extent that my very close friend Chas will actually laughingly say, "Such a pixie!" when I am being silly sometimes.
So when the woman presenting the piece approvingly quotes some dude called Nathan Rabin as follows:
Rabin writes, “That bubbly, shallow cinematic creature that exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures.”
... that's kind of angering, because I'm sorry, but I exist in the real world, too, and what we're dealing with here is the much wider problem of female characters existing in works of fiction solely to catalyse the personal growth/journey/whatever of the usually-white male hero, which is in itself a subset of everyone who isn't a white male Hero existing in works of fiction solely to catalyse et cetera et cetera et cetera. There are a lot more Magic Negroes and characters of colour with no independent conceptual existence than Manic Pixie Dream Girls out there.
And given that this is also done to other female characters, suggesting that the only ones who are really terrible are "Manic Pixie Dream Girls" is somewhere in between really infuriatingly insulting to people like me, and offensively dismissive of everyone else who gets treated like they're only there to further the hero's personal journey.
(Bonus offensiveness: Spot the nasty ablism contained in one of the movie scenes played as an example of how hilarious Manic Pixie Dream Girls are.)
To Bitch and Feminist Frequency: Hollywood isn't the one telling me I don't exist here. You are.
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You know, Australia, as a rule, isn't generally much of a factor in the politics of other countries. We're just not.
But the approaching referendum on the Alternative Vote in the UK has the anti-AV campaigners launching a quite amazing quantity of scurrilous lies, ridiculous misunderstandings and outright smears towards our nation, and it's a tiny bit insulting.
For a full breakdown of both what they're saying about us and just how wrong they are, you can go straight to Antony Green's blog. It's worth noting that the smears extend to the No2AV campaign's website having described him as a "self-styled 'Australian Elections Expert'", which is almost, in and of itself, a sufficient basis for war.
Antony Green isn't a self-styled expert. Antony Green is the national public broadcaster's election expert and has been for many years, and his knowledge of Australian elections is without parallel. He is spectacularly knowledgeable and accurate, and also unbelievably scrupulous in his non-partisan status. No-one knows how Antony Green feels about politics. He has never evinced anything even approaching a bias towards any party or candidate. He is one of the most respected people in this country, and he is loved nation-wide every time we have an election.
Impugning Antony Green is something you just don't get to do, dammit.
I'm also particularly irked by criticisms based on the fact that Australian elections don't get a formal result declaration for a couple of weeks after the election itself is held. This keeps being offered as criticism of the AV system.
News flash, you ignorant Pommie bastards: Australia is a bigger country than the United Kingdom. We have INDIVIDUAL ELECTORATES that are bigger than the United Kingdom. And because we are a proper democracy, it is important to us that everyone gets to vote.
This means that postal votes are counted, and postal votes don't close off for 10-14 days after the election, because some citizens of this country live a very long way from pretty much anywhere.
Even if that weren't the case, the election can't be final until the ballot boxes have been taken from polling stations to the returning officers, which also takes longer when, for example, you have a single electorate that is six times the size of the UK.
But really the delay is about postal votes. Because postal and absentee ballots are given sufficient time to get there, because in Australia, everyone gets to vote.
Frankly, a country that mismanages the basics of democracy so badly that some people don't get to vote because they were still waiting in line at a polling station when the polls closed doesn't get to say ANYTHING negative about Australian elections. Because ours work.
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I need more icons. This requires me getting around to making them, though. And when I'm feeling creative I keep doing other things lately...
Things of the moment:
Today is my day for feeling abandoned.
I'm losing my will to engage with certain people, because there's "calling people on legitimately bad behaviour", and then there's "being a judgemental ass", and if you're over in category two, I just don't have the energy to do more than roll my eyes right now.
Especially since a lot of it could basically be summarised with: "Someone doing something you don't want to do is not a :violation of your rights:, even if they're doing it where you can see it/hear it/whatever."
Maybe you hate Fall Out Boy. If I drive past you in a car with the windows down and loud Fall Out Boy playing in my car at 2pm on a Tuesday, that will qualify as annoying. I am not infringing your rights.
Maybe you hate fireworks. This does not mean you magically acquire the right to object to Diwali fireworks displays. There are fireworks. Deal with it, princess. Shutting down a Diwali celebration because people don't like fireworks, don't like lights, or don't like Hindus would be an infringement of their rights.
(I'm ambivalent about the degree to which the general illegality of fireworks in Australia is wrong, because on the one hand, I believe people should be able to celebrate their religious festivals, but on the other hand, I believe bushfires are a bad thing, and fireworks are kind of high-risk to let loose in the community...)
Unless you can demonstrate a way in which other people's religious festivals actually cause you harm, then regardless of whether you dislike the festival or the religion, we return to deal with it, princess.
(And no, "it upsets me" doesn't count. To return to our Diwali example, the community should be notified that there will be fireworks, so that people who, say, are deeply upset by loud noises can take appropriate action to prepare/protect themselves. However, someone being around who is upset by loud noises doesn't get to have to the fireworks stopped entirely, because shut the hell up if you don't get this.)
Don't even get me started on the topic of hating on Christmas celebrations. Me, I kinda hate Christmas. It's depressing. It's like an event designed to make people with small families, dysfunctional families or no family at all feel as acutely miserable as possible. And it's two weeks after my birthday, which means that trying to celebrate my birthday gets aggravatingly tricky - everyone has "Christmas parties" and nobody cares about individuals' birthdays at this time of year.
I don't like Christmas.
However, trying to stop everyone else enjoying Christmas would make me a jerk.
So, accordingly, I shall conclude this rather dyspeptic post with the following sentiment:
I hope that all of you reading this experience joy this December, however you should spend it, and with whomever you spend it. I hope you are loved and feel it. I hope you are happy, at least some of the time.
If the other festivals don't float your personal boat (or even if they do), I encourage you to celebrate this Friday, the 10th. Have cake, or some other delicious treat, if you can, and have it in a spirit of joy and self-indulgence. If anyone questions you, dismiss their questioning outright, because it will be my birthday, and I will readily proclaim that everyone should feel entitled to some sort of treat on my birthday.
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Dear Morons,
Rescinding an invitation to be a Guest of Honour is not equivalent to or in any way similar to any of the following things:
- censorship
- book-burning
- suppression of discussion
- suppression of ideas
- fascism
- ideological puritanism
- acts of hate
It is the following:
- rescinding an invitation to be a Guest of Honour
I'm pretty sure Elizabeth Moon would be welcome to buy a ticket and attend WisCon on her own. I'm absolutely sure that her absence will in no way hinder the attendees' ability to talk about her and why her invitation was rescinded.
This doesn't mean that WisCon is enforcing a particular set of "left-wing political views". Hostility to people putting forth extensive screeds of flagrantly racist crap and refusing to acknowledge even the slightest error in their words or deeds isn't even a political stance, it's standing up for good manners.
Oh, and posting a Robert Heinlein quote is kind of failtastic. Especially a bombastically pompous one. I love me some Robert Heinlein, truly I do - there's about three Robert Heinlein books I haven't read, and it's only because I never got around to them. (Podkayne of Mars, Assignment to Eternity or whatever it is, and maybe one other. They were on my parents' bookshelf with the rest, I just... yeah, never got around to them. I was always too busy rereading Space Family Stone, Space Cadet, Starship Troopers, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, The Number of the Beast (man, how awesome would that book have been had his brain not broken and the book subsequently just derailed halfway through)... I've even read Time Enough For Love and The Cat Who Walked Through Walls more than once. And Stranger in a Strange Land. Which, by the way: cannibalism.)
That list is already getting to part one of why RAH is not the "I Win" button you think he is. Part one being: same dude you're quoting as a great moral authority about censorship and so on wrote a bunch of books featuring extensive incest. Seriously. There is so much incest in some of those books.
Part two: Heinlein doesn't think you're a worthwhile human being. If you're a man, you don't know enough maths, or if you do know enough maths, you don't know how to fire enough guns, or if you do, you're probably still not going to know how to slaughter hogs, deliver babies, or build a house. If you're a woman, well, unless you're being a genius at everything (including maths) while also popping out unsustainably large numbers of babies, he hates you too. Oh, and you should be gorgeously beautiful, obviously.
Part three: He was a hardcore "freedom is when everyone has guns" Libertarian, who believed that corporal and capital punishment should be systemic and only veterans should have the vote - assuming that democracy was going to be involved at all, since really, the world should be run by people who know better than you. And that society would be better off if everyone had guns so they could shoot people who were wrong and criminal justice was dispensed by "whoever was around at the time".
No, really. In Heinlein's ideal societies, everyone's polite because not being polite gets you killed by vigilantes, and if there is a court to deal with something, the judge is whoever's handy at the time, even if they're imposing a death sentence.
Part four: In Heinlein's societies there are the Real People and there are the yammerheads. Everyone who's bitching about someone getting disinvited from something is a yammerhead. If you are complaining about something at all, really, you're a yammerhead. This means you don't count, and should be disenfranchised.
Robert Heinlein wrote a bunch of good books, but ideologically he was somewhere to the right of Ann Coulter. Citing him is about as much proof of how correct your position is as, well, citing Ann Coulter.
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Okay, so, the spider bite on my hand? I'd resigned myself to the fact that it's *totally* going to scar, etc, even though it's not an open wound or anything because my body clearly Did Not Want whatever that thing injected in me and encysted everydamnthing and that's going to take a while to heal, etc.
It hasn't bothered me because it didn't hurt or anything.
But now?
Now it is ITCHING. ITCHING LIKE AN ITCHY ITCHY THING. And I can't scratch it because a) I don't actually want to tear the skin, and the skin is all weird and papery there now, and b) I don't want to risk somehow spreading the toxins around my hand. For all I know my bones will fall out if that happens.
I HATE SPIDERS. I am not arachnophobic, never have been, I'm not scared of them, this is ACTUAL HATE.
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So, the Miliband brothers were in competition for the British Labour party's leadership.
I don't know enough about them to say which I think should have won, my comment is on some of the media commentary.
This was this running theme in a lot of the coverage I saw: that Ed Miliband was, somehow, undertaking some kind of uprising to contend for the leadership against his older brother. A sense that because David is the older brother, it would be natural for Ed to leave the leadership to him.
As a younger sibling, let me say this: fuck that noise.
There is something wrong with all of society that thinks that older siblings have some kind of natural right to take precedence over younger siblings. This only applies to monarchies, okay? There's no ethically or morally defensible argument I can think of to explain why "you were born earlier" should grant someone a higher state of privilege.
I have an older sister. We don't exactly have a great relationship - in fact, at present, we don't have any kind of non-biological relationship at all. I think the last time I saw her was last Christmas, which was in turn the first time in a number of months, and in all likelihood the next time I'll see her will be in the vicinity of Christmas - if then.
So obviously I'm going to have some bias against the idea that she has some kind of inherent superior Rights to mine because she's older.
On the other hand, I have friends who don't hate their older siblings whom I know agree with me. (Note least because of a conversation with one about this very topic that started with the Milibands.)
The point is: Ed Miliband had every right to contend against his older brother for the leadership. This wasn't some kind of usurpation, David had no greater claim to it than Ed just because he's older.
And, like all the other privilege mechanics of the kyriarchy, the assumption of power and authority of older siblings can fuck right off right around the time all involved parties achieve parity in their ability to cross the road by themselves.
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But how is it feeling?
So, in the end today, I managed to get my package - Dave and I detoured to the post office on the way to him dropping me off for therapy.
In the post office I got a number of smiles from the mother of a toddler - he was in a pram, and as they came in, he was grizzling a bit. His mother tried to shush him as they joined the queue directly behind me, without much success.
I turned around and knelt and talked to him a bit until I coaxed a shy smile.
A lot of the time, I think, very small persons who are acting grumpy and miserable and are making the kinds of noises adults wish they wouldn't are in fact just bored. After all, how would you feel if someone put you in a wheelchair, strapped you in, and then wheeled you around utterly uninteresting places you didn't choose to go to for hours while ignoring you, except to tell you to be quiet if you made any kind of noise?
By the way, in this scenario, you can't read, not even signs that you go past, and you get in trouble if you fidget too much. Also, if you're hungry or thirsty, that's your problem, you can wait until the person wheeling you around feels like giving you food or drink, and you're not allowed to touch anything.
I don't know about you, but it sounds like it should be considered "cruel and unusual punishment" to me, not "normal life for toddlers".
I wish more people in charge of small children would think about this, and actually talk to and interact with the kid more. I know conversations with small children can be tedious, but they can also be enchanting and mind-blowingly fascinating, and I think both you and they will be the better for it.
Failing that, at least tie a couple of toys to the pram and let them have something to play with.
Because there's people like me out there. And you know, as much as I try not to, when I see a child who's miserable, and it's patently clear that they're miserable because they're bored and their parent/guardian/other is ignoring them while they do their own thing?
Just a little tiny bit, I will be thinking: You are a bad parent.
It's not that I'm customarily hyper-judgey of parents. If your baby is crying, I don't think that reflects badly on you as a parent. If your toddler is being a brat, I don't think that reflects badly on you as a parent unless I see you on multiple occasions and your toddler is always a little ratbag. Pretty much every child will have days where even the most loving parent, let alone observing stranger, will wonder whether contraception might have been a better idea after all - I like to believe that a kid who's behaving badly is just having a bad day.
I used to live with a three-year-old. I adored the kid, and most of the time we got on terribly well, but just occasionally she would be in a Mood, and at those times, well... I still loved her, but I didn't exactly want to scoop her up and hug her. On one notable occasion she decided that she Wasn't Going To Bed, and threw screaming fits if I even said she should, let alone picked her up and carried her to her room. She fetched a her-sized chair from her room, carried it into the living room, and sat on it with arms folded, glaring at me as she declared her intention to Sit There.
At which point I decided I had definitely had Enough, and since I knew perfectly well that she was utterly exhausted and would not be able to sustain this for long, I said fine and let her sit there while I read a book.
Eventually she got bored, gave in and agreed to go to bed.
My point: Even the nicest kid can be a little shit sometimes. I get that. But when your child's misbehaviour is entirely because they're bored, I disapprove.Current Location: Catalyst; couch
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So, I was just reading a random fic in which a character is busking. With a guitar.
The character has just been collected by another character, and having made a decision, he: "... stuffed his guitar into the case."
This has made me twitch so hard I can't keep reading, because, ARGH.
1) It's been implied heavily that the money he's received has been dropped into his case. In which (ha) case: There's probably COINS in there, which will DAMAGE HIS GUITAR. He is presented as being a guitarist who is busking poor. He will not wantonly risk damage to his guitar, surely?
2) In that vein: one does not "stuff" a guitar into a case, particularly a hard case, which this has to be for it to be open on the ground. Not only does "stuff" imply a carelessness which no, see point 1, but also, they are GUITAR-SHAPED. The only way you can put a guitar in a hard case in a "stuff"-like manner is to jam it in and probably break it, because it's a rigid container the correct shape and size for the contents - putting it in is not exactly difficult or time-consuming.
Okay, I'm done.
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A couple of notes about driving, travel, and road design.
1) When it's raining, turn on your lights.
I know this doesn't actually illuminate the road at all in daytime. The point here is not to help you see - it's to help you be seen. In heavy spray, in heavy rain, your car is pretty much invisible. This is not good.
2) When designing traffic control for a road, use EITHER a roundabout OR traffic lights. NOT BOTH. The combination of the two is INSTANT GUARANTEED TRAFFIC SNARLS ALL THE TIME.
3) You know what's useful? Road signs. Including signs indicating the speed limit. Expecting that people will "just know" is really, really annoying to tourists. And we're supposed to be something you want, for the sake of your economy, which is still ailing rather badly.
I am sufficiently sick of driving in Britain that I am quite looking forward to going over to Europe.
No love,
Sami
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You know, if I'd realised Bioshock had such unbelievably bad copy protection on it, I would have pirated it instead of buying it.
(And that, right there, is why copy protection on software is stupid.)
Not only did it require an internet connection to finish installing, so it could check for a patch, which: what the fuck, 2KGames, if your game needs to check for a patch to INSTALL, then it is clearly NOT READY TO SHIP - but it also required online activation AND THEN wanted the DISK TO BE IN THE DRIVE in order to run.
Naturally, I went to GameCopyWorld and got a fixed exe so it will run without the damn disk in the drive, because I HATE THAT LIKE POISON, but seriously, I wish I'd just pirated it and then I wouldn't have to deal with the copy protection. (GameCopyWorld is awesome, but a site that specialises in breaking copy protection for legal copies of games should not have to exist. The fix I got doesn't let you run it without activating it - you HAVE to have a legal copy. It just runs the game without the CD.)
Recently I heard a program start on the radio which involved speaking to reps from the music industry about music copyright and piracy and ooh, RAGE, I had to turn it off immediately.
Because the thing is this:
mp3 downloads are good for the music industry. It is thriving. And I am infuriated by their complaints.
Ultimately, the result of this will probably be that musicians will make more money from their talent and the companies that exploit them will make less. So I can see why they're screaming... it just annoys me anyway.
And anti-piracy measures only EVER cause problems for legitimate users - for pirating purposes, you just break the anti-piracy stuff, and you're fine.
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Let's say, for the sake of argument, that the surname I was born with was "Resume". And it's pronounced like the verb - r'ZYOOM. (I'd IPA it but I can't be bothered.) And all my life, people have made a habit of pronouncing it wrong - r'ZOOM or REZyoom or rezyoomay, like it's the word for a CV.
And all my life, when people mispronounce my name, I've corrected them.
You'd think this would be a fairly minor thing - we're all agreed it's open to some interpretation, but we're also, I'd hope, all in agreement that it's my name and how it's pronounced is up to me. Sure, people on my father's side of the family have a vote, and they can pick another pronunciation if they really want to, because then it's their name, but in as much as the name I bear is MINE, how to pronounce it is up to me.
I'd hope, but I know that isn't so. Because all my life, I've had people correct me on how to pronounce my name.
Not "they read it off a form or a list and got it wrong", correct me, but I mean, they've got it wrong, I've said no, it's pronounced like this, and they've said no it isn't, or just pointedly kept repeating it their way.
Quick tip: If you do this to someone, they are going to conclude that you're an asshole, and they're going to be right.
Because my name is part of who I am, a part of me. Names are important. And if you try to tell me that you know how to pronounce my name and I don't, you're trying to tell me that you have more of a right to define who I am than I do.
I don't think it's coincidence that the people who do this tend to be the kind of people who play power games all the time - it's a way of controlling the conversation, controlling the discourse, controlling you. Which is why, since recognising that, I don't let that slide. I will be smiling and pleasant but I will be firm.
To quote Lieutenant Data: One is my name. The other is not.
Where it gets interesting, to me, is the cultural aspect. The surname I was born with was originally Germanic, but it was anglicised around the time of the First World War - a more anglo spelling, though the pronunciation has shifted to be yet more anglo since. Trying to define the pronunciation sometimes feels like people are trying to define the degree to which my cultural identity is permitted.
Which isn't a big thing, when it's someone like me - I'm only vaguely foreign, and in any case, I'm still white - but then you get the cases where it's really political.
Yes, I'm talking about Judge Sotomayor.
I'm not giving a link to that ass Krikorian, but he said: Deferring to people's own pronunciation of their names should obviously be our first inclination, but there ought to be limits. Putting the emphasis on the final syllable of Sotomayor is unnatural in English (which is why the president stopped doing it after the first time at his press conference) ... and insisting on an unnatural pronunciation is something we shouldn't be giving in to. [...] This may seem like carping, but it's not. Part of our success in assimilation has been to leave whole areas of culture up to the individual, so that newcomers have whatever cuisine or religion or so on they want, limiting the demand for conformity to a smaller field than most other places would. But one of the areas where conformity is appropriate is how your new countrymen say your name, since that's not something the rest of us can just ignore, unlike what church you go to or what you eat for lunch. And there are basically two options -- the newcomer adapts to us, or we adapt to him. And multiculturalism means there's a lot more of the latter going on than there should be.
NO THERE ISN'T. Because, asshole, there's a difference between pronouncing a name in a way that is already Anglicised but to an approximation of correct and anything that can possibly be called "unnatural". What is not natural to English is rolling the R. Which is not required. Syllabic emphasis variation is deeply, profoundly within the category of SUCK IT UP. Attempting to pronounce someone's name correctly is the most basic of courtesies.
Trying to define how non-Anglos should pronounce their names is a clear attempt to exert control - to force Sotomayor, and anyone else, to abandon any visible markers of differing cultural identity. America doesn't follow English pronunciation rules at all, after all, or are we changing the pronunciation of Arkansas at last?
Shut up, right wing morons. Just shut up.
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I just came across someone complaining about the Racism 101 comm on LJ being "moderated by white women".
Same person complains about the universality with which non-white folks are granted superior authority in matters of race, by the way.
The thing is this:
Racism 101 is basic shit. That's the whole point. You do not need Authentic Non-White People to run it, to give their Brown Seal of Approval to things. Moreover, expecting non-white people to busy themselves with watching over the education of clueless white people is dear God what is wrong with you people anyway?
Think of it like this: a non-white person has a Ph.D. in Racism And Associated Crap. They may also, in fact, be wrong about some things. They may, in fact, be a fucking moron who needs to be smacked in the head with a chair. However, the discussion of their stupid-ass wrongness is not one a high schooler who's read, like, one primer on Racism And Associated Crap is going to be able to enter without being annoying and even more wrong. Odds are that if you think they're stupid and wrong, you just don't understand what they're talking about.
A Clueless White Person is someone who's in, like, year ten. Thinks they know everything, actually knows jack. If this were science, we're talking about someone who may possibly have a decent understanding of Newtonian physics and elementary geometry, but thinks relativity is e = mc2 because that's the Einstein thing, right?
Racism 101 does not need people with a Ph.D. in Racism And Associated Crap. It needs high school teachers. People who can teach Newtonian physics and don't find it aggravatingly basic and a painfully reductionist approximation of reality. This is the kind of crap that Somewhat Clueful White People can handle. And should.
Non-white people can get involved if they choose. Some people do teach high school even though they have a Ph.D. Sometimes because that's what they really want to do. But expecting Racism 101 to be taught by non-white people so you can have a more Authentic Experience in your Very Special Learning is, in fact, a branch of fail all its own.
Non-white people/people of colour are not required to teach you. They have no obligation or reason to hold your hand and walk you gently through the mists of your own ignorance to the bright sunny dawn of Clue. And you are probably the five hundredth person to ask them to do so.
If I'm getting irritated by the recurring cycle of "Teach me! Teach me! YOU have to explain stuff to me or it's YOUR FAULT if I'M RACIST", it is way, way past the point of seriously uncool.Current Mood:  grumpy
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People - always, so far, as part of a dismissal of all this discussion in really bigoted ways that also annoy me, but that's another diatribe - getting crankypants about the use of "fen" as a plural of "fan".
To which I want to say: shut the fuck up.
To which I'm attempting actually to say: Actually, that's an extremely well-established piece of fan argot. Communities that are subsets of a greater linguistic population, whether they be social, professional, or whatever, have a strong tendency to develop their own terms of common reference, slang, technical terms, etc. The sf/f community is no different. The terms are many and varied, and if you've been involved with fandom at all, you've used at least some of those words - for example, "fandom" is one of them.
"Fen" has been in use since before a lot of you were born. I can state categorically that it has been in use since the 60s; it may be older.
"Fen" has distinct meaning from "fans". It means not just people who enjoy and appreciate a given thing; it means people who are fans of sf/f and are active and involved in fandom. It means Our Kind Of People. People who understand.
You don't get to define the terms of an existing subculture to fit your pre-conceptions. In the same way that you can't decide that slash should now be called Angular Fucking, or whatever, you don't get to say that "fen" is unacceptable. Languages evolve by mass consensus, and are resistant to the efforts of individuals to control them. "Fen" entered the language before you entered fandom (if you've been active in fandom for the last forty years and still hate "fen" - wow, are you a slow learner, is all I can say) and protesting it makes you look like an idiot.
In summary: shut the fuck up.
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Man, there's a distinct flaw to having your entire music library on shuffle when catching up on Mammothfail reading: the cognitive dissonance caused when reading thoughtful race-related discussions when We're Gonna Have To Slap The Dirty Little Jap crops up from your collection of World War II music.
My possible future Ph.D. on the subject of popular music in war notwithstanding (still only vaguely conceptualised for a reason, and may be done for Honours instead: tentative title "How Vera Lynn Defeated Hitler: Music, Morale and the Home Front", although the stuff I have about the Home Front may end up being a different dissertation entirely), and the part where I appreciate the historical interest aspect of propagandist racism (hi, Superman!) also set aside... no, basically.
Some of my WW2 music I actually like. Lili Marlene? One of my favourite songs. I have several versions, in English and German. And some of the propaganda songs never fail to crack me up, like these:
When der Fuhrer says, he is the Master Race
Then we'll heil (thbbt!), heil (thbbt!) right in der Fuhrer's face!
and
Hitler has only got one ball
Goering has two but very small
Himmler has something similar
And Mister Goebbels has no balls at all
But that, right there, is part of what's so fascinating about propaganda, and war-era popular culture's role in it. Some of it is stuff that doesn't seem so bad, some of it is stuff that, after a few decades, seems really mindblowingly horrible.
And it puts an odd spin on the racism of old people. If someone grew up listening to that kind of thing, how much can you blame them if they have some persistent racism in their attitudes? Especially if they nonetheless endeavour to be nice to people of !ethnicity?
One of the most vitriolic racists I ever knew was an old man who, to the day he died, could not hear mention of anything that involved the Japanese without it triggering an expression of anti-Japanese hatred. I could never criticise him for it or think less of him for it, for one important reason: he'd been a prisoner of war of the Japanese during the Second World War.
Let's just say his experiences were not such as to dispose him kindly to the nation from which they hailed.
I could not, in conscience, try to persuade someone who'd been through the horrors he had, experiences more terrible than most of us can imagine, that he should try and forgive the Japanese people for the sins of their forebears. Neither I nor anyone else could have that right - he suffered, and blaming the Japanese for the deeds of the Japanese army is not exactly a stretch. He went to his grave hating Japan and the Japanese people, and I would vigorously defend his right to that hatred. (Possibly he could have got past it on its own had he had the PTSD counselling he needed, but without that? Nobody's call to make.)
A woman I know, who was a child in Italy during the Second World War, hates Germans and Americans. The Germans were bad; in her view, the Americans were worse, because the German officers kept a very strict discipline on their men, whereas Americans were often drunk in the streets, and set up a rape camp near her house. For some time she lived in fear that the Americans would take her for that.
She's 82 now. A kind and loving woman. Not racist at all, that I'm aware, to anyone but Germans and Americans - but she still thinks those are lesser peoples. I don't feel the right to tell her otherwise.
However.
There's a statute of limitations on that kind of thing. Someone of my generation, I feel, doesn't get to maintain a race-based prejudice on the grounds of crimes which are not ongoing. The English put my ancestors in concentration camps - okay, they had the right to hate all English people. The Anglo-South Africans (called English) tormented my father for being Afrikaaner throughout his childhood and adolescence - does he have the right to resent them? Well, yeah, kinda, actually. It's not the best thing for him, it might be healthier if he could get past it, but that's his journey to make.
But I don't. They're not my wounds, and maintaining the hate only perpetuates the evils of racial cruelty. The cycle has to stop. So I don't want to hold onto those hatreds, the bitterness of unrighted wrongs. (What can be done to make good the cruelty the English inflicted on my ancestors during the Second War of Independence - the one they call the Boer War?)
I can leave that all behind, because it doesn't affect me any more. I grew up a first-generation immigrant in another country, and my mother was the South African-born daughter of first-generation immigrant British parents. Culturally, I picked up a lot more from my mother and her Scottish mother than I did from my father's side of the family.
Whereas.
Injustice can only be surrendered once it's no longer causing active harm. The black and native populations of America are still being hurt by the legacies of the crimes against them, by institutionalised, all-pervading racism that has merely continued, modified, from the days of slavery and "nits make lice". Indigenous Australians have gone from bounties to the Stolen Generation to military intervention alongside active neglect - there is no basis for them to be obliged to let go of anger towards the white man. There may be cases where that's helpful, and it's always worth judging any individual you meet on their own merits... but until there is no systemic harm under way, it's just like the old man hating the Japanese. Wounds have to heal. His hadn't, they'd festered across decades - but that's understandable, for individuals. For others, the same wounds can't heal, when they're ripped open, again and again, by people poking them with sharp sticks.
This is why "reverse racism" doesn't exist. It just doesn't. The woman I encountered a few weeks ago, who accused me of moving away from her at the bus stop just because she was black and I was assuming she was going to try and rob me, when in fact - as I pointed out - I was moving away from her because she was smoking... yeah, she was being a jerk. But if she were white, she'd have been an asshole about that in a different way. Some people suck. Accept it and move on, don't use that as justification for how somehow black people are just as racist as white people.
Learned response is not the same as prejudice. If you had found, all your life, that almost every person you saw wearing a hat smacked you in the face, wouldn't you flinch when you saw a hat? Wouldn't you think that hat-wearers just sucked?
I'm not sure what else to say. It's time for lunch and meds, my brain ferrets are waking up.Current Music: Ipi Tombi - Emdudeni Uhlele
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Mr Barnett described the poll question as “unnecessarily complex” and said he believed West Australians would not have to go back to the polls on the question for at least another decade.
( Ranting. )Current Mood: really damn sick of DST
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Okay, here's the thing: I was going to take a break from posting about this RaceFail stuff, because I've got four assignments due in the next week and I've been in a bad way for pain the last few days and I'm running out of spoons... and besides, as someone who's a) only peripherally involved in fandom right now and b) certified white (no, really. By a government), who says I'm someone who even should be making daily arguments about race issues in fandom?
The thing is, though, not saying what I think about stuff also costs me spoons. Spoons that, right now, I can't afford, because an out of spoons error quite literally could kill me. So for the sake, if nothing else, of my brother-out-law, who's having to deal with me trying to deal with everything, I'm not going to shut up.
I keep seeing this same whine pop up, in a couple of different forms.
If I try to write PoC but I do it wrong, I'll get attacked. I guess I just WON'T EVEN TRY.
So you're saying that you can't write an alt-history that removes a race, or any alt-history at all if you get right down to it. Because you'll get attacked. These expectations are so unfair.
I... FLAMES. FLAMES ON THE SIDE OF MY FACE.
*takes a deep breath*
See... here's the thing.
You are allowed to write characters of all races and ethnicities. You are. What will not pass unchallenged is writing them as stereotypes, or as nothing more than props for the betterment of white characters. No-one's stopping you doing that either, technically, people will just point it out as offensive, because it is.
It's also bad and lazy writing, anyway, so why would you want to be able to do that? Be grateful for critical readers - they'll make you a better writer if you let them.
This complaint is seriously akin to: "Man, when I go into shops, they don't let me steal what I want and piss on the displays. I GUESS I JUST WON'T GO SHOPPING THEN."
You are allowed to write alternate histories on any premise you choose. However, you have to think about it.
The problem with The Thirteenth Child is not, inherently, the unpopulated Americas. It is entirely possible to write a genuinely good alt-history on those terms.
The problem with The Thirteenth Child is that:
i) The author removed all native populations from the Americas, and then proceeded on the assumption that this would make no substantial changes to history. That the USA would be about the same. That is just bad history, and is therefore fundamentally a bad alt-history novel. You engage with history, you think about it, or... else. Seriously. We history types are slow to rouse, and not so quick and worldly... but we will fuck you up. Because we are persistent. We are the kind of people who will chase ideas through microfilm and archives, breathing dust for days on end, and we live to argue.
ii) The author explicitly did this because it "eliminated the problem" - HER WORDS - of having to choose between two disliked stereotypes of the Indians. "Eliminating the problem" is, historically, also code for attempted genocide. A genocide of which the author herself is essentially a beneficiary.
I am honestly bemused that someone could write that down and not realise what they're doing. That it didn't seem to occur to her that "writing the Indians as people instead of stereotypes" was an option. That she didn't see that the implication of subtracting the natives but leaving the development of the United States more-or-less the same is that she thinks that the contribution of the natives (and of slavery, which she also skipped over for her own ease) is negligible.
That's not all of what's going on, of course, but my point is: Writing an alternate history in which the Americas had no indigenous population is a valid choice. But you would have to recognise the vast changes that would wreak in world history. You just can't treat it as a minor choice.
As I said before:
I'm not saying it's impossible to write speculative fantasy on these premises - what I'm saying is that you can't do it as background. If you write a people out of existence as background, rather than as the setup for an exploration of how the world is different without their influence, then you're almost guaranteed to be doing it for reasons that are entirely offensive.
Apologies for the less-lucid quality of this post - ultimately, I'm really frustrated with these lines of argument, and it's harder for me to argue things that seem like they should be intuitively obvious. A part of me just wants to know why the hell do people want to be able to get away with bad, lazy writing? WRITE BETTER AND YOU DON'T HAVE THIS PROBLEM.
So, in essence:
Dear people who think the expectations of PoC-and-allies fandom regarding non-white characters/races are unfair,
It's fine. Lern2play.
STFU,
Sami.Current Mood: tired Current Music: Baseball: Detroit vs Minnesota
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So, this evening I was reading Keith Windschuttle's article in the current issue of Quadrant: Why Australia Is Not A Racist Country.
And if I were having less success at being amused by it, I'd be absolutely outraged.
His argument is not only that Australia is not racist now (his assertion of a happy, multicultural nation fails to take into account the success of One Nation, such as it was, or the race riots in Cronulla, but then he seems to be very good at selective attentiveness), it never was. While a critical reading of the article by anyone interested will, of course, provide many examples of why he sucks, and unless you care enough to read the article itself you probably won't care for an exhaustive breakdown written by me, there are a couple of particularly good examples I can't resist.
1) He cites as a reason for the non-racist nature of Australia society the fact that... Rudyard Kipling was popular.
Apparently in his world there was no racist content in Kipling.
Note that I think very highly of Kipling, and am a huge fan of such of his work as I have read. However:
But despite his dirty 'ide, 'e was white, clear white, inside...
Nooo, that's not racist. The fact that Gunga Din concludes: "Though I've beated you and flayed you, by the livin' gawd that made you, you're a better man than I am, Gunga Din." does not mean there is no racist content. (I may have the variant spelling and punctuation wrong, I'm quoting from memory.)
2) Where there is clear evidence of popular racist sentiment, he dismisses it; e.g. when referring to the strong concern of the governments dismantling the White Australia Policy that incautiously fast progress on that matter would cause them to lose office by provoking racist outcry by the public, he says that this fear was simply, "in [his] opinion, unwarranted."
Brilliant.
3) "After the early gold rushes, the Chinese were largely excluded by the organised labour movement from the traditional skilled trades, as well as other unionised occupations such as shearing and wharf labouring. Nonetheless, they found their own economic roles. They came to dominate market gardening and eventually had an effective monopoly, growing no less than 75 per cent of the vegetables in the whole country. This led them to become the principal hawkers of vegetables and to control about one fifth of Australia's fruit trade. Chinese also found ready employment in the hospitality industry, especially as cooks. Half the cooks in Australian hotels in the late nineteenth century were Chinese. In the 1880s they dominated the low-cost furniture manufacturing industry, leaving the high-quality end of the market to European tradesmen."
Seriously, to me that reads as an argument in favour of the notion of widespread racism in Australia. Discuss.
4) Windschuttle is a windbag, I suspect a racist, certainly a revisionist (worst of all), and something of an idiot, but he's also a hilarious elitist; more than once in the article he uses the phrase "the lower orders"; what he totally, totally means is, "the lower classes". (But of course, Australia is supposed to be a classless society. The obvious joke about how of course Australians have no class is hereby acknowledged.) Because of course, only shabby proletarians are racist, the intelligentsia could never be so crude.
He's so bourgeois it's wonderful.
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