#authoritarian tendencies

[tomorrowusa]

Tennessee’s descent into far right extremism probably began gradually a while ago but didn’t get much notice until the late 2010s.

And it wasn’t until 2023 that things became so hideous that the state began to attract worldwide attention.

Any sane person or business thinking of relocating there is probably having second thoughts.

[trendynewsnow]

The Irrevocable Shift in American Politics: Reflections on Kamala Harris and Donald Trump

The End of an Era: Reflections on Kamala Harris and the Trump Presidency Kamala Harris may not have succeeded in her bid for the presidency, but one of her campaign slogans resonated profoundly even in defeat: “We’re not going back!” This assertion, intended as a rallying cry against the status quo, has taken on an unintentional truth. The return of Donald Trump to the political forefront…

[my-pjo-stuff]

At this point everyone and their mother know that I'm a proud German and like to bring in fun stuff or specific things about my country up once in a while. Generally I'm trying to stir away from it, seeing as this is my PJO blog and I don't want to bore you all. But I think it's time to play my "As a German" card and say that the PJO fandom needs to take the words "fascist", "eugenicist" and "nazi" out of their collective vocabulary. Now I don't think I need to explain what those things have to do with my country. I will however explain the fact that German children tend to me made very aware of the meaning of those words. We learn about our history and the crimes committed. We learn about the past ideologies of the Third Reich and how to dismantle them. I especially have grown up being very sensitive to these things, as my parents have placed great importance on me understanding the whole of my country's history. That includes the Third Reich.

And as such to say that I am frankly horrified at the way the PJO fandom treats these very loaded terms is an underestimate. I have seen multiple different people comparing Luke and the TA to Nazis, saying they are eugenicists or even fascists.

Which is just genuinly so harmful because they are not.

I won't go into the specifics of the way they are not because it would go beyond the scope of this post while also being very easily searchable simply by googling the definition of the aforementioned words.

Using labels such as "Nazi", "Eugenicist" and "Fascist" on people and things that are not waters the term down a lot. Which is genuinely harmful because there very much are still IRL people with those beliefs! We cannot allow ourselves to forget the true horror of these words, because that would allow these horrors to return. If every villain starts being a "nazi"- then how can we recognize the actual nazi?

This fandom seems to love the "fiction has an impact on real life" argument. As a German I am genuinely asking you to apply this here. Now don't get me wrong- it's fine to point out these ideologies and practices in fiction aswell as parallels should they be found. I myself pointed out how Camp Jupiter's Wolfhouse is borderline eugenicist- but you NEED to do your proper research first. There are plenty of other valid ways to criticize characters, especially Luke, if you want to do it. But calling him these names is just genuinely harmful.

Please be careful using these words, and remember who and what stands behind them.

[thecruellestmonth]

Bruce Wayne + Ra's al Ghul parallel: "a manageable number I can control"

In JLA: Tower of Babel, Ra's al Ghul orchestrates military conflicts, economic collapses, and disasters around the world, so that "the human race thins itself to a manageable number I can control."

JLA (1997) #44 "Tower of Babel Part 2", written by Mark Waid (2000)

In Batman: Gotham Knights #38 (2003), Bruce Wayne says he's been pushing Stephanie Brown out of the Batsquad (by freezing her out of her support network, crushing her confidence, firing her), because he's "trying to protect this extended family from becoming too large and unmanageable."

Batman: Gotham Knights #38, written by Scott Beatty (2003)

[dionysus-complex]

.

[basingstokemercury]

Odo: I don't understand what's so hard about just obeying the law. Isn't having a clear basis for society safer all round? Adam Cartwright: Yeah. I could never see the appeal. Odo: So I use my shapeshifting abilities to keep a close watch on all potential criminals, whether or not they have a reasonable expectation of privacy. Adam: ...I think I need to reevaluate our friendship.

[thousandyearphantombunker]

My baby girls with hero complexes 😍🥰❤️

This is a safe place for Belos and James lovers!

We've both been called genocide apologists because we like fictional characters no matter how many times I explain that I think James committing genocide was ooc or how Belos just doesn't work as a villain for me because the 'realistic horrors of homophobia/racism'- weren't portrayed well at all! But uhh apparently that makes us genocide apologists

considering having a sane conversation surrounding these men is impossible us fans might as well just start saying our faves have done nothing wrong to piss people off

Like yes kings slay! Shoot Sleet and brand people's wrists! These men have done nothing wrong in their lives ever!

[mashamorevvna]

the aeducans are my kardashians insofar as i call them all coquette with no exceptions and for each family member i have selected three lana del rey hits, but this is all an elaborate ruse to juxtapose their glossy blonde look with the authoritarian tendencies festering and writhing in the family as it eats itself from the inside out, which is also a metonymy for the decay of dwarven society

[ravenkings]

i s2g literally ALL of conservative politics is projection. EVERYTHING they accuse the left of doing are things they either do themselves or plan to do once they get just a tiny bit of power.

[amerasdreams]

well, russia created this monster. Now that the monster is doing what monsters do--using violence--

Russia:

[poorlittleyaoyao]

I think the problem with this fandom is that it contains way too many people who would read Julius Caesar and think the assassination is an Irredeemable Villain Moment for Brutus* while also thinking Antony is super valid for burning down half the city and doing proscriptions to avenge one (1) guy.

* Cassius already had his Irredeemable Villain Moment by sending anon letters because that means he LIED. Cassius is lying all the time, you see, even when he is talking to himself.

[half-life-crisis]

#ITOLDYou! #Podcast E-7!  #InfoOperations campaigns cause #CognitiveDissidence. This is how #propagandists #brainwash #goodpeople to #commitatrocities.

#Watch here https://youtube.com/watch?v=kzVtV40pyM8…

#Read more https://halflifecrisis.com/hlc-articles/info-operations-and-cognitive-dissidence…

#Help #stubborn #lovedones not becoming #usefulfools!

[zevranunderstander]

what do you even do when you realise that your pen and paper character that is so quintessential to you that you think about him 10 times a day has the closest parallels imaginable to motherfucking greg hirsch. greg hirsch.

[caparrucia]

Full offense and pun fully intended, but I genuinely think the very existence of "dead dove, do not eat" was a fucking canary in the mines, and no one really paid attention.

Because the tag itself was created as a response to a fandom-wide tendency to disregard warnings and assume tagging was exaggerated. And then the same fucking idiots reading those tags describing things they found upsetting or disturbing or just not to their taste would STILL click into the stories and give the writer's grief about it.

And as a response writers began using the tag to signal "no, really, I MEAN the tags!"

But like.

If you really think about it, that's a solution to a different problem. The solution to "I know you tagged your story appropriately but I chose to disregard the tags and warnings by reading it anyway, even though I knew it would upset me, so now I'm upset and making it your problem" is frankly a block, a ban and wide-spread blacklisting. But fandom as a whole is fucking awful at handling bad faith, insidious arguments that appeal to community inclusion and weaponize the fact most people participating in fandom want to share the space with others, as opposed to hurting people.

So instead of upfront ridiculing this kind of maladaptive attempt to foster one's own emotional self-regulation onto random strangers on the internet, fandom compromised and came up with a redundant tag in a good faith attempt to address an imaginary nuance.

There is no nuance to this.

A writer's job is to tag their work correctly. It's not to tag it exhaustively. It's not even to tag it extensively. A writer's sole obligation, as far as AO3 and arguably fandom spaces are concerned, is to make damn sure that the tags they put on their story actually match whatever is going on in that story.

That's it.

That's all.

"But what if I don't want to read X?" Well, you don't read fic that's tagged X.

"But what if I read something that wasn't tagged X?" Well, that's very unfortunate for you, but if it is genuinely that upsetting, you have a responsibility to yourself to only browse things explicitly tagged to not include X.

"But that's not a lot of fic!" Hi, you must be new here, yes, welcome to fandom. Most of our spaces are built explicitly as a reaction to There's Not Enough Of The Thing I Want, both in canon and fandom.

"But there are things on the internet that I don't like!" Yeah, and they are also out there, offline. And, here's the thing, things existing even though we personally dislike or even hate or even flat out find offensive/gross/immoral/unspeakable existing is the price we pay to secure our right to exist as individuals and creators, regardless of who finds US personally unpleasant, hateful or flat out offensive/gross/immoral/unspeakable.

"But what about [illegal thing]?!" So the thing itself is illegal, because the thing itself has been deemed harmful. But your goddamn cop-poisoned authoritarian little heart needs to learn that sometimes things are illegal that aren't harmful, and defaulting to "but illegal!" is a surefire way to end up on the wrong side of the fascism pop quiz. You're not a figure of authority and the more you demand to control and exercise authority by command, rather than leadership, the less impressive you seem. You know how you make actual, genuine change in a community? You center harm and argue in good faith to find accommodations and spread awareness of real, actual problems.

But let's play your game. Let's pretend we're all brainwashed cop-abiding little cogs that do not own a single working brain cell to exercise critical thinking with. 99% of the time, when you cry about any given thing "being illegal!!!" you're correct only so far as the THING itself being illegal. The act or object is illegal. Depiction of it is not. You know why, dipshit? Because if depiction of the thing were illegal, you wouldn't be able to talk about it. You wouldn't be able to educate about it. You wouldn't be able to reexamine and discuss and understand the thing, how and why and where it happens and how to prevent it. And yeah, depiction being legal opens the door for people to make depictions that are in bad taste or probably not appropriate. Sure. But that's the price we pay, creating tools to demystify some of the most horrific things in the world and support the people who've survived them. The net good of those tools existing outweighs the harm of people misusing them.

"You're defending the indefensible!" No, you're clumsily stumbling into a conversation that's been going on for centuries, with your elementary school understanding of morality and your bone-deep police state rot filtering your perception of reality, and insisting you figured it out and everyone else at the table is an idiot for not agreeing with you. Shut the fuck up, sit the fuck down and read a goddamn book.

[pawberri]

The key problem with "proship vs anti" discourse is that the most extreme versions of each side, the ones who actually bother to identify with these labels, accepted each others worst takes as arguments they had to debate. "Fiction =/= reality" is, in practice, an absurdly reductionist, anti-intellectual, thought-terminating-cliche that dictates we can learn nothing about a person via art and that their fiction reflects no political or moral messaging worthy of critique. In response to this, the "puriteens" who are too young to possibly hope to articulate their discomfort, to untangle their position from what is often real trauma experienced online, simply argue "yes, fiction influences and reflects reality in a 1 to 1 capacity." They, and people who want to use the groundwork they laid to make bad-faith callouts, make bad arguments about how the action of engaging in problematic fiction is on equal ground to real life abuse, or is a clear indicator of interest in real life abuse. Both of these arguments are terrible, but each side seems to radicalize the other further and further into their own brands of anti-intellectual reactionary belief. "Proshippers" become libertarian absolutists about free speech and view all transgression as righteous and alternative and therefore leftist. They gain a reactionary nostalgia for the past, desiring a time when people didn't seem to care about the implications of art. "Antis" become authoritarian and hypervigilant for signs of moral decay, at their worst, willing to align themselves with government bodies that offer carceral solutions to the debate. They are willing to use harassment as a tool of punishment, which then leads to false accusations and a fear of openness that puts people at risk of being triggered via obfuscation. (That said, proshippers also take part in plenty of harassment.)

I will say that I believe both of these movements are equally sensitive to co-opting by right-wing forces. We see the authoritarian tendencies of anti culture in harassment campaigns and even the way Republican law makers co-opt "grooming." The proship/fic crowd has such extreme nostalgia for the past that I often see people align themselves with the cultures of 4chan or other happily right-wing websites. They so heavily reject the idea that a drawn sexual depiction of a child could reflect any desire that they are disinterested in analyzing what the motivation behind the depiction is. i.e If we track the history of lolicon in Japan we do find that is, yes, countercultural, but that counter culture is right wing, very misogynistic, and defensive of patriarchial Japanese culture as it is and was including its culture around rape and abuse. Plenty of fictional content works as radicalization material, and radicalization material needs to be ambiguous. There is a valid reason to be hesitant to trust people who consume this content, even if I do not believe most of them will ever be dangerous towards children. The mere presence of sexuality is not enough to make a movement left wing. This kind of thing can again be seen in right-wing libertarian movements in the US. (And even leftist movements can be bigoted and even "pro-pedophilia" or otherwise disinterested in social reform around abuse.)

Is all content with elements of age-play this way? No. But to me, that is why kink media deserves to be treated as art and analyzed, critiqued, treated seriously. It doesn't have to do anything to anyone to be worthy of a moral critique. Said moral critique just doesn't warrant harassment and cruelty and reactionary exaggerations of the person consuming said content.

Anyway, what's my point in saying all this? I don't know. I'm just begging you to tag your God damn content with specific tags instead of random and nebulous shit like "dead dove" or "dark content", and also begging you to stop harassing people who do tag their content so I don't have to guess what "dead dove" and "dark content" mean. No one will erase incest kink fics or people who feel sickened by the idea of them off this earth because we aren't god, but we could at least all be responsible about tagging, flagging, and age-gating our stuff.