LEP 16.8.

[yvannairie]

Mildly concerned about the sudden jump in valorising normality in the wake of The Country That Shall Not Be Named's presidential race making "weirdo" the du jour political slur.

Comments

[cimorene]

I can see what they're going for there, and the point is important that the movement is one of radical change that is so far from the mainstream most people would barely believe it... , but the effect was inevitable the way that insult is usually used. 😕

[yvannairie]

The real difficulty with this for me is that at the same time, I'm watching the end results of a long harassment campaign against a funnyman on Youtube that I like finally resolve after he took a six month hiatus from his literal job just to let the people who wanted to bully him off the internet have a win. I'm already very raw and twitchy and feeling the urge to start slamming my fist at whiteboards with long accompanying rants about how suuuuure you communities are so nice but how do you treat your enemies? Hell, how do you treat people who just kind of annoy you?

Like, how am I supposed to tell who my actual allies are and who is ready to slaughter me as a lolcow if everyone "on my side" talks literally the same way as the people who want nothing but harm to me?

(Granted people being incindeary and not thinking about the consequences of their words is not exactly new.)

[cimorene]

Yeah, it's pretty impossible to tell. In fact, I'm not sure that progressive or arty communities have ever actually been safe, really. I've seen an increase in talking about it publicly in the last ten years or so - the toxic patterns in progressive political and leisure spaces that is - but is that just changing media and community patterns making it easier to amplify marginalized voices (ie the corresponding rise in trans visibility and more open discussion of the problems within the queer community or the increasing visibility of misogyny in Hollywood?)

The persistent myth or illusion that they ARE safe, or were before some arbitrary date (usually like two years ago or whenever the writer first was personally affected), is a big problem in those spaces.

[yvannairie]

It's like an all-new, turbo messed-up version of nerd social fallacies being perpetuated by people in a space that is increasingly welcoming to normies and increasingly hostile to people like me. And, like, I get how that sounds, because god knows fandom has always been unwelcoming to people not sufficiently white and close to the hegemonic ideal, but it's still messed up! I don't understand how people can consistently turn around and treat people in the exact same shitty ways they got treated that made them alienated and wishing for community in the first place!