#online purity culture is a death trap

[proheromidoriyashouto]

hey! just saw ur rb of that blog post about proshipping and antis and it was an interesting read, what are your thoughts on the matter?

hello! oh boi oh boi uhhhhhhhhh

there's this idea among younger people on the internet--I am 28 years old for reference--that everything needs to be a safe space in the sense that it is the responsibility of all adults/fandom participants to engage with their interests in completely inoffensive ways to "protect the children."

this became very long so here is a read more:

"the children" meanwhile feel it is their right to wander anywhere they damn well please, even spaces not intended for them at all, sometimes especially places excluding them, and make demands of the people in those spaces. it's not that "the children" don't read the warning signs, but that they as "feelings yakuza" believe they are entitled to safe spaces.

most people calling themselves "antis" as described in the article, like the individual known as "A", feel that all safe spaces must be their safe spaces. it must be safe for them to engage with fandom in all respects. so when they see the signs telling them to be wary of things that might upset them in certain corners of their fandom, they become upset that their feelings are not being catered to by part of the fandom that resides there even though these people would not interact with them in the first place and should not be forced to self-censor themselves for the benefit of people who are not supposed to be there.

like when somebody jaywalks on a busy street and gets mad when a car almost hits them because "pedestrians have the right of way." this is only true at the designated crosswalks and intersections.

but the jaywalker is not ignorant of the existence of the crosswalk, of the existence of cars, of the yellow weight-sensor on the edge of the sidewalk, of the cameras watching the intersection, of the button on the pole, of the flashing light system controlling the flow of traffic, of the loud sound that will play when someone is crossing the street at the crosswalk. they know these things exist. and that these systems are there in the first place to protect them.

they don't care. if it's safe to cross at one part of the road, it should be possible to cross anywhere safely. the people driving the 6-ton metal-cage-full-oil-and-explosions machines are the ones guilty of putting their rolling death carriages anywhere near "the feelings yakuza's" body, in their mind.

"antis" do not take responsibility for putting themselves in uncomfortable and/or dangerous situations. they choose to enter blogs labelled with disturbing content, are disturbed, and being the emotionally immature children they are, blame the blogger for putting their creation "where anybody could see it." because the "anti" is a child who needs to be protected, why weren't they protected from themselves???

in this digital age, parents are not teaching their children how to be safe online. when i was little and commercials would come on about "fun" online websites, they always included an audible disclaimer to "ask your parents before going online." even PBS kids, a site for kids that should be safe for kids by default, included this.

younger millenials and gen z do not get these disclaimers in the content they consume. not in the ads they get, not in the ebooks/fanfics they read, not in the social media they beem straight into their brains from the moment they wake.

the internet is awide open field all for them. they are de-sensitized to the dangers oversharing personal information can get you in, they don't understand that it is their own responsibility to safeguard themselves and their own spaces because it is not truly possible for anyone else to do it for them.

some people do unintentionally stumble into gross and/or nsfw fandom content, but rather than simply retreat to more familiar places make it their mission to condemn fandom participants who don't participate in fandom like they do. this is the rot caused by purist cancel culture. the idea that you cannot morally engage with problematic things because it means you condone those things in real life, when any sensible person would know that is not true.

i joined fandom when "don't like don't read" was the wisdom. i even think of myself as an "anti". even after reading the article.

i don't want to engage with problematic content; incest ships/abusive relationships/pedophilia/ageplay/etc. i think these are reasonable things to find disgusting and remove from my own space. but i do not attack people who make these things. there is nothing i can do to stop them from creating what they want no matter how much it may disgust and distress me.

i can only curate my own blog/social media to be as safe for me as i deem appropriate. i am an adult. it is on me to make judgements and act on them. when something i hate shows up on my dash/timeline/board i block that person without a word and move on. i block new terms all the time to avoid stumbling into what i consider gross content online. i report instances of harm to real people the few times i've seen it and move on. i don't harass people. i don't go into artist DMs and yell at them about how my feelings are hurt by their inconsideration of me, the internet stranger they do not know.

i am not a fandom mom. i am not the fandom police.

the modern "dead dove: do not eat" is not hard to interpret, and it is absolutely everywhere. it doesn't even mean that the content of the fic or art or blog or post is disgusting or degenerative. it just means "this is labelled correctly. the label on the tin is what is in this. if it says, 'cannibalism' in the tags, that means there will be human flesh consumed by human beings described/depicted in the content you are choosing to consume." its the "read at your own risk" of the current day.

but people self described as "antis" or "proship DNI" cannot keep their feelings to themselves. they are children who feel attacked. so they attack in turn and feel justified in doing so.

it's terrible that asian/SEA/japanese artists are being bullied by stubborn, ignorant americans/westerners. and i'm not sure how to go about changing the minds of antis.

and as an adult in fandom, it isn't my job to cater to children in my own adult spaces. i keep a relatively safe for work blog on tumblr, but that is mostly coincidental. i tag things that i think are nsfw or harmful or distressing to others like blood or flashing lights or animal death, for example, because i do not want to hurt people.

but this is ultimately my space. i do not want to see the character Ba//k//u//g//ou from My Hero Academia on my socials so I unfollow and block accounts that post content of him and his friends and related ships, especially what i deem to be an abusive relationship. i have all the related and adjacent tags filtered.

when i make my own posts discussing how i feel, i do not tag it in ways that will put it on the dashboards of stan accounts. this is not perfect, but it allows me to have my own opinion without targeting people for enjoying themselves online differently than me while engaging with like-minds.

i'm not going to tag a reblog of a nice cake as "food tw/cw pastry/trigger warning" and that will upset people who have food related trauma. this simply isn't the blog to follow for those people in that case and it is on them to unfollow/block me. (i am not invalidating anyone with food trauma with this statement. it is just an example.)

you have to do what is best for yourself. no hard feelings.

[spjcomicart]

White, Green, and Tara

Stefano Junior Om Tare Tuttare Tara Soha, Om Tare Tuttare Tare Soha, Om Tare Tuttare Soha—so goes the Matra of one magnanimous Mother of all Mother deities. Tara, is Compassion embodied yet is she who wears 21 distinct guises and from which splinters crystalline and colouful into myriad more. It is also she who derives her existence from Avalokitesvara, bodhisattva of Compassion who bore her of his tears.. It is she whom was once a corporeal princess who affirmed the value of the feminine principle. “I prostrate to the Liberator, Mother of the all Victorious Ones” is more or less what her mantra elucidates. But how, and moreover, how does the practice of Vashryana Tara benefit the practitioner in a way distinct from other Buddha or spiritual deities and how does the practice of the feminine aspect of Buddha correlate or differ from the veneration of the Virgin Mary in the west? (1) Long ago, the Victorious One, came into existence and was known as Light of Worlds. The Princess “Moon of Wisdom” had the highest respect for his teaching, and for 10 million and 100,000 years she made offerings...; after much discourse she replied “In this life there is no such distinction as male or female,......weak minded worldlings are always deluded by this.” And so she vowed “Therefore may I, in a female body, work for the welfare of beings right until Samsara has been emptied” Then (guru Tathagatha Dundunbhisvara) prophesied “As long as you continue manifesting such supreme Bodhi, you will be exclusively known as “Goddess Tara”. Tara, later quite obviously embraced as a feminist icon, both as either the reincarnation or reiteration of Avalokitesvara from the tears he wept for the suffering of those trapped in an endless state of Samsara or the enlightened Moon Princess who relinquishes her humanity, she always insists on the necessity for the recognition of the female as essential. Despite her claim that gender has no corporeal relevance at the arrival of Buddhahood, the principle of femininity, motherhood, creation, compassion and myriad aspects associated with women culturally are vastly ancient. Dating as far back as the legend of the chaotic waters of Tiamat an Innana of Mesopotamia in the East, the notion of the female aspect and her attributes could either have been inherited culturally through India, or arrived at instinctually, or some combination of both. And with Tara, as with all Buddha, she comprises all aspects of both the feminine and qualities of the nature and cosmos. Conversely, the visuality of a Maternal Buddha would no doubt attract women to adhere to the tenets of spiritual enlightenment both for themselves, their daughters, and the good that they might contrive to do for their families in this realm during their current life cycle. In Christianity, no one inhabits this role more exclusively and effectively, for centuries, than the Virgin Mary. Mary of Nazareth, the purported mother of the Son of God, Jesus, is venerated by Christians all over the world as the “mother” of all of us and is sought in solemn prayer for 2 guidance, comfort, protection, and compassion. The repeated and recited prayers over her Rosary beeds thanks her for her stewardship of her son and asks that she not only forgives us for our transgressions but the “sins” of those that would do us harm-the ultimate act of contrition. Because only compassion for our enemies and ill doers over ourselves and our kin can truly exemplify a transendent forgiveness or “enlightenment”. Tara wields her own “Golden” rosary, in thanks to Taranatha, or Kun-ga nying-po a scholar and Buddhist created the rosary in 1615 after founding the monastery Tak-tan. The rosary follows a process of recounting Tara’s Tantras and lineage but most notably on the arrangement of her powers that save the practitioner from Eight great Fears; but more on that in a moment. Tara, as Buddha, is both the Mother AND the Father. She is the spiritual embodiment of Compassion and Virtuous enlightenment but she is so of her own accord, not because of the suffering she vicarously endured at the hands of her son’s persecuters. Tara is the “Saviouress” because she is compelled through her enlightenment to have “Karuna” (compassion) for the suffering that is inevitable in human life and the cycle of Samsara that all beings are subject to, in spite of their ignorance and proclivity for evil. “Tara” means Star and as such, she is both a maternal teacher and comforter as she is a guide to those who seek passage. Navigators and shipsmen would practice Tara as she might literally reveal their path and illuminate their journey while protecting them from the insurmountable dangers that abound. But she acts to do so also on the spiritual plane just as she is meant to gently encourage, an “Immovable Encouagement”, an individual or party on achieving or arriving toward their goal or undertaking. What greater force is there more 3 immediately recognizable and emotionally enmeshed than that of a Mother’s encouragement? If not for which, the majority of men AND women may not have taken its first steps. Not unlike the Hindu Elephant headed Ganesha, himself the son of Parvati-the wife and feminine aspect of Shiva, who eliminates obstacles from the worshipper who seeks his aid. (2) The Goddess destroying all hindrances is the supreme remover of Fears. For the practitioner’s protection draw Her, righteous, granting boons. The daughter of the ten Powers and Compassion is the Goddess wearing a woman’s form. Draw Her, the bestower of boons, for the welfare of all beings. (Vajrayana “Mahavairocana-Sutra” 716 ad) Tara can take away your Fear. 3)She is the Protectress from Fear of Leprosy. In the Land of Kumaraksetra, a powerful acarya caught leprosy, and he wandered from one person to another, he infected them. Relatives fled fro his presence as he defiled their purity. One day he saw a stone image of Noble Arya Tar and with faith begged her on behalf of the 500 infected Brahmins. A liquid like medicine trickled in an endless stream from Taras hand and when he had bathed in it the leprosy had subsided. The man’s own compassion for his fellow sufferers was essentially key to Tara’s blessing. Tara has compassion but calls upon us to actively engage with it on our quest to enlightenment through suffering. In addition to fear of disease, Tara can also aid in assuageing the fear of Losing Relatives among the Eight she is ward of. And thusly, combined with her vast magical attributes comprise the green of of a prosperous nature, that guide, protect, and encourage humankind, amidst her 4 many faceted faces, Tara is the ultimate Mother and can provide comfort to all in our insular trials and those we inevitably contend with in the physical world through our journey through Samsara. Whether or not an individual believes or not is another story. But those of us who have been reared by mothers know how very real a mothers love and compassion can be if immaterial and how moving her physical embrace can be (perhaps the Tara’s many arms could effectually embrace our spirit then); and also her wrathful judgment-but that story and that of Tara’s more terrifying aspects would be better suited explored in another essay. 4).​ Empower Us, that we may evoke without hindrance, that we may act as friends to the unfortunate that we may achieve our own and other’s aims, that we may gain the highest magical attainment. In January 2020 as the Coronovirus took a foothold in Asia and surrounding countries, the Dalai Lama encouraged Buddhists to practice Tara and chant her Mantra. Om Tare Tuttare Tara Soha....Om Tare Tuttare Tare Soha...Om Tare Tuttare.. Perhaps it cannot effect a cure as the world stands traumatized at the rampant death count and dissemination of our economies and regular life practices, but perhaps, like a Mother, Tara can aid us in achieving peaceful mindfulness, that we may have compassion for those whom are suffering instead of fear and acceptance of inevitable forces beyond the influence of our human will. This unprecedented level of global suffering may reorient our attention to the suffering of all and how meaniful existence can better be arrived at through compassion and courage. 5 Works Cited Wilson, Martin ​In Praise of Tara​, 1986,1996. Print Shaw, Miranda ​Buddhist Goddesses of India,​ 2006. Print Beyer, Stephan​ ​ ​The Cult of Tara ​1973. Print Templeman, David (Taranatha, Jo Nang) ​The Origin of Tara Tantra​, 1981 (1608) Print Wikipedia ​Tara (Buddhism), 2​ 020 Online Tibet Diary ​Corona Virus: The Dalai Lama advised Tara Mantra,​ 2020 YouTube Masters of Buddhism ​Short Biography of Tara​, 2018 YouTube 6

[reikiajakoiranruohoja]

Old person yells at kids

All jokes aside, I’m pretty fed up with the way I am seeing people discuss and blame others on this platform or online in general. Blame people and create lines that honestly we should not have. It is a common joke that while the Right-wing attacks the Left, the Left actually attacks itself as much. So much so that the worst dredges of the Right-wing have freaking weaponized it. Not that it needs to when we manage to form hate groups for one another just fine. Think about it, one of the most popular webcomics, Homestuck, is now bad because it had crazy fans. Steven Universe gets shit from various things. Dream Daddy was hated for rumours of one of its staff being a paedophile. The Adventure Zone got flack for making Taako blue, etc. Here’s the thing as many have said it, seeking purity will never work. For one, nothing is perfect or remains perfect. Mistakes, real adult mistakes, happen. But people making them aren’t monsters, they just messed up. For media, the best thing we can do is to support that which drives our ideals, because the more people hear it the wider the audience. Think of Dream Daddy, it normalized the idea that gay men can be caring fathers. You might think this is nothing to celebrate, but some people still think gay men will molest little boys and -make- them gay. Not out of hate, but because that is frankly all they know of gay people. To dismiss a work due to its associations with a toxic person, you are in a way causing a harmful gate-keeping behaviour that will end up being harmful. Death of the Author is not just based on Author vs Fan opinions, but also on separating the work from its creator. I still think SpoonyOne’s Ultima series and his Counter Monkey vlogs were eye-opening for me in terms of establishing loyalty to lore and of roleplay etiquette. This does not mean I support the man for what he has said. This applies to real life as well, people fuck up. People fuck up a LOT. That is human nature and most people try to grow out of bad habits when they realise them. We can speak about neo-nazi as monsters all day, but there are many who gave up that life whose information is still valuable. Are these people eternally evil because what they once did? I only know that they are instrumental in establishing ways to avoid young people from falling into the same trap they did. That’s the thing, we need to have at least somewhat of a unified front. We do not need to always -like- those we stand with, but we shouldn’t limit our world to Pure and Filthy binaries. That is not what people are and by creating these divides we split ourselves into very vulnerable clans. Another thing is, that as much as Tumblr hates American Christianity, we sure do behave like it. Think about it, the purity culture, the hunger to find sin in everyone and the very tight categories we all fall into. That is exactly what American Christianity is like. I am not asking you guys to forgive, but I am asking everyone to -think- before they say something against someone else. Think of where you fall the lines with your acceptance and where does it lead you. Because we are vulnerable -because- of our divides, not inspite of them.

[queeranarchism]

8 Steps Toward Building Indispensability (Instead of Disposability) Culture

(Reposting this article by Kai Cheng Thom because Tumblr ate it. Sorry long post, page break hates me)

give an mc without integrity a mic

and s/he will rhyme the death of the people

—d’bi young anitafrika

When I first came into activist culture, I was a runaway queer kid searching for a home: a terrified, angry, suspicious, cynical-yet-naïve teenager whose greatest secret desire was for a family that would last forever and love me no matter what.

Yet I also knew that such a family could never exist – at least not for me.

You see, I had another secret: Underneath all of my radical queer social justice punk bravado, I knew that I was trash. I was dirty and unlovable. I had done bad things to survive, and I had hurt people. Sometimes I didn’t know why.

So when I found activist culture, with its powerful ideas about privilege and oppression and its simmering, explosive rage, I was intoxicated. I thought that I could purge my self-hatred with that fiery rhetoric and create the family I wanted so much with the bond that comes from shared trauma.

Social justice was a set of rules that could finally put the world into an order that made sense to me. If I could only use all the right language, do enough direct action, be critical enough of the systems around me, then I could finally be a good person.

All around me, it felt like my activist community was doing the same thing – throwing ourselves into “the revolution,” exhausting ourselves and burning out, watching each other for oppressive thoughts and behavior and calling each other on it vociferously.

Occasionally – rarely – folks were driven out of community for being “fucked up.” More often, though, attempts to hold people accountable through call-outs and exclusion just exploded into huge online flame wars and IRL drama that left deep rifts in community for years. Only the most vulnerable – folks without large friend groups and social stability – were excluded permanently.

Like my blood family, my activist family was re-enacting the trauma that we had experienced at the hands of an oppressive society.

Just as my father once held open the door to our house and demanded that I leave because he didn’t know how to reconcile his love for me with my gender identity, we denounced each other and burned bridges because we didn’t know how reconcile our social ideals with the fact that our loved ones don’t always live up to them.

I believe that sometimes we did this hypocritically – that we created the so-called call-out culture (a culture of toxic confrontation and shaming people for oppressive behavior that is more about the performance of righteousness than the actual pursuit of justice) in part so that we could focus on the failings of others and avoid examining the complicity with oppression, the capacity to abuse, that exists within us all.

And I believe we did it in part because sometimes it’s impossible to imagine any other way: We live in a disposability culture – a society based on consumption, fear, and destruction – where we’re taught that the only way to respond when people hurt us is to hurt them back or get rid of them.

This article comes out of that queer kid’s longing for forever-family, and from countless conversations with other members of social justice communities longing for the same. It comes out of my own fuck-ups having been generously forgiven by others, and from my effort to forgive those who have harmed me.

It comes from a desire I feel all around me for an alternative to the politics of disposability, for a politics of indispensability instead.

“Indispensability politics” isn’t a term I’ve coined personally. It has existed various communities for some time, and I learned it orally, though I cannot find a written source. But the following principles are ideas – suggestions for a foundation on which indispensability culture in leftist activism might be built. They are a work permanently in progress.

They’re not meant to be a new set of rules for activism. Nor are they a step-by-step guide for holding accountability processes or a complete answer to the questions that I’m raising around.

Still, I hope that they are helpful to you.

1. The Revolution Is a Relationship

sometimes

we want to close our eyes

jack off to pictures of radical disneyland

not watch as we gnaw our own

flesh into meat

—Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, “so what the fuck does conscious mean anyway”

Something that worries me about social justice communities is that we tend to conceptualize “revolution” as a product, as a place and time that we expend all of our energy and anger to create – often without regard to the toll this takes on individuals and our relationships.

In this way, “The Revolution” occupies a position in activist culture that actually reminds me of the role that Heaven played in the Chinese Christian community I grew up in: It is a fantasy of ideological purity against which our actions are judged, a place that we long to live in, but seems impossible to reach.

In our – often justified – anger and disappointment at the failure of ourselves and our communities to uphold the dream of revolution, we lash out.

We try to cleanse ourselves of the pain of betrayal by cutting off and driving out the betrayers – our abusive families, our conservative friends. We try not to look at the betrayer in the mirror.

What if revolution isn’t a product, some distant promised land, but the relationships that we have right now?

What if revolution is, in addition to – not instead of – direct action and community organizing, the process of rupture and repair that happens when we fuck up and hold each other accountable and forgive?

2. The Oppressor Lives Within

The most important political struggle I will ever have is against the oppressor – the racist, transmisogynist, ableist, abusive person – in myself.

I don’t mean to say this in a self-flagellating, self-blaming way. I’ve experienced oppression, violence, rape, and abuse from others, and this is not my fault.

I mean that I’ve started to believe that I can’t engage in authentic activism, I can’t create positive change without recognizing and naming my own participation in the oppressive systems that I’m trying to undo.

Coming from this position, I’m forced to have compassion for the people around me who I see also participating in oppression, even as I’m also angry at them. With compassion comes understanding, and with understanding comes belief in the possibility of change.

When we become capable of holding that contradiction in our hearts – when we can be angry and compassionate at the same time, at ourselves as well as others – entirely new possibilities for healing and transformation emerge.

3. Accountability Starts in the Heart

Too often, I’ve seen accountability processes in social justice communities devolve into vicious “your word against mine” situations and social power plays in which people accuse each other of harm and abuse.

As witnesses to these situations, we become trapped, caught in the double bind of either having to pick a side or doing nothing. Both options carry the risk of becoming complicit in the harm being done, and the “truth” becomes impossibly blurred.

I often wonder how different things would look if it were more of a cultural norm to understand accountability as a practice that comes from within the individual, instead of a consequence that must be forced onto someone externally.

What if we taught each other to honor the responsibility that comes with holding ourselves accountable, rather than seeing self-accountability as a shameful admission of guilt? What if we could have real conversations with each other about harm, in good faith?

In a culture of indispensability, I cannot ignore someone when they tell me I have harmed them – they are precious to me, and I have to try to understand and respond accordingly.

To become indispensable to one another, we must also be willing to be responsible for and accountable to one another.

4. Perpetrator/Survivor is a False Dichotomy

There is an intense moral dynamic in social justice culture that tends to separate people into binaries of “right” and “wrong.”

To be a perpetrator of oppression or violence is highly stigmatized, while survivorhood may be oddly fetishized in ways that objectify and intensify stories of trauma.

“Perpetrators” are considered evil and unforgivable, while “survivors” are good and pure, yet denied agency to define themselves.

Among the many problems of this dynamic is the fact that it obscures the complex reality that many people are both survivors and perpetrators of violence (though violence, of course, exists within a wide spectrum of behaviors).

Within a culture of disposability – whether it be the criminal justice system of the state or community practices of exiling people – the perpetrator/survivor dichotomy is useful because it appears to make things easier. It helps us make decisions about who to punish and who to pity.

But punishment and pity have very little to do with revolutionary change or relationship-building.

What punishment and pity have in common is that they’re both dehumanizing.

5. Punishment Isn’t Justice

Punishment is the foundation of the legal criminal justice system and of disposability culture. It’s the idea that wrongs can be made right by inflicting further harm against those who are deemed harmful.

Punishment is also, I believe, a traumatized response to being attacked, the intense expression of the “fight” reflex. Activist writer Sarah Schulman discusses this idea in detail in her book, Conflict Is Not Abuse.

It isn’t inherently wrong to want someone who hurt you to feel the same pain – to want retribution, or even revenge. But as Schulman also writes, punishment is rarely, if ever, actually an instrument of justice – it is most often an expression of power over those with less.

How often do we see the vastly wealthy or politically powerful punished for the enormous harms they do to marginalized communities? How often are marginalized individuals put in prison or killed for minor (or non-existent) offences?

As long as our conception of justice is based on the violent use of power, the powerful will remain unaccountable, while the powerless are scapegoated.

But even beyond this, a culture of disposability and punishment breeds fear and dishonesty.

How likely are we to hold ourselves accountable when we’re afraid that we’ll be exiled, imprisoned, or killed if we do? And how can we trust each other when we live in fear of one another?

We have to find another way to bring about justice.

6. Nuance Isn’t an Excuse for Harm

One of the most common responses I see to critiques of call-out culture and disposability is that perpetrators of violence and predators use these critiques to obscure their own wrongdoing and avoid accountability.

Furthermore, we, as communities, use the “complexity” and “nuance” of such critiques as excuses for not intervening when harm is being done.

But indispensability means that everyone – especially those have experienced harm – are precious and require justice. In other words, we cannot allow the fact that something is complicated or scary prevent us from trying to stop it.

Trapped in the perpetrator/survivor dichotomy of understanding harm, it might seem like we have only two options: to ignore harm or to punish perpetrators.

But in fact, there are often other strategies available.

They involve taking anyone’s – everyone’s – expressions of pain seriously enough to ask hard questions and have tough conversations. They involve dedicating time and resources to ensuring that anyone who has been harmed has the support they need to heal.

7. Healing Is Both Rage and Forgiveness

If the revolution is a relationship, then the revolution must include room for both rage and forgiveness: We have to be able to tolerate the inevitability that we will be angry at one another, will commit harm against one another.

When we are harmed, we must be allowed the space to rage. We need to be able to express the depth of our hurt, our hatred of those who hurt us and those who allowed it to happen – especially when those people are the ones we love.

It is up to the community to hold and contain this rage – to hear and validate and give it space, while also preventing it from creating further harm.

The expression of anger and pain is key to the transformation of violence into healing, because it allows us to understand what has happened and motivates us to change.

And it’s up to the community as well to then provide a framework for forgiveness, to help envision a future where forgiveness is possible, and how it might be achieved.

8. Community Is the Answer

There are no activist communities, only the desire for communities, or the convenient fiction of communities. A community is a material web that binds people together, for better and for worse, in interdependence…

If it is easier to kick someone out than to go through a difficult series of conversations with them, it is not a community. Among the societies that had real communities, exile was the most extreme sanction possible, tantamount to killing them. On many levels, losing the community and all the relationships it involved was the same as dying.

Let’s not kid ourselves: We don’t have communities.

—Anonymous, Broken Teapot Zine

The above quote is a revealing glance into the inner dynamics of social justice and activist culture.

It reveals the source of our incapacity to create accountability and the deep emotional and material insecurities that lie beneath it.

Perhaps the reason we tend to recreate disposability culture and trauma responses over and over is because we are all, secretly, that frightened runaway kid, constantly searching for a home, but not really believing we can find one.

Maybe we don’t create communities of true interdependence – of indispensability, of forever-family – because we are terrified of what will happen if we try.

But I believe, have to believe, that true community is possible for me and for all of us. The truth is, we can’t keep going on the way we have been. We need each other, need to find each other, in order to survive.

And I have faith that we can.

[i-will-not-be-caged]

Social Contract Theory and Fandom Libertarianism

An essay in which I finally get to put my political science degree to work

So I was out walking my dog this morning and ruminating over why I have such a hard time with the conversations in fandom that seem to assume that the only two options when it comes to content are “all fan works must be pure vanilla innocence” and “all criticism is policing and evil.” To be clear, I think both extremes are, well, extreme and lacking nuance. But since I don’t actually see a whole lot of “no one can write characters doing anything wrong” in my corner of fandom (although I’m aware that plenty of it exists other places), I was much more interested in trying to figure out what bugs me so much about the “policing is the greatest evil in fandom” side of things.

Here’s the epiphany I had — people on that extreme end of things bother me because they sound so much like libertarians, much like a lot of us see echoes of fundamentalist purity culture on the other end. And then I got excited because once upon a time I was a political science major and now I get to take my epiphany and my degree and talk about social contract theory like the giant nerd I am :)

Strap in, folks; this got crazy long.

(This is, obviously, going to be pretty U.S.-centric. I’m assuming libertarianism exists in various forms in other countries, but I’m most familiar with the U.S. version, being an American and all, so that’s the lens I’m working with.)

The Libertarian Party in the US is all about “minimum government, maximum freedom.” Their website claims that they are the “the only political organization which respects you as a unique and responsible individual.” They “seek a world of liberty — a world in which all individuals are sovereign over their own lives and no one is forced to sacrifice his or her values.”*

Sounds pretty good on the surface, but when you start to look at the practical implications, well, there are a lot of problems.

Libertarians believe that people should only pay taxes if they want to, which sounds nice if you don’t like paying taxes, but also means there would be no government-provided social programs to help people in need. No WIC, no EBT, no unemployment assistance, no libraries (at least none that weren’t privately owned).

They believe that an unbridled market, free of government interference, will lead to greater prosperity and equality for everyone. Except their version of government interference includes things like child labor laws and environmental protections and product safety regulations.

They support civil liberties for everyone, claiming that “other political parties prioritize the rights of some, but not others.”* Again, sounds good, but when combined with their emphasis the free market, in practice this means that most libertarians end up supporting business owners’ right to discriminate rather than protecting customers from being discriminated against.

And don’t even get me started on school choice.

From the many conversations I’ve had with libertarians over the years, I’ve learned that what it boils down to is basically libertarians wanting all the benefits of living in a society without any sort of responsibility for their fellow community members. They don’t understand just how much of their life is a benefit that comes from the work other community members have done. They believe that everyone should just take care of themselves and leave everyone else alone, which can sound appealing, but breaks down as soon as you add in the existence of history, inequality, and injustice.

���Responsible individuals” who are “sovereign over the own lives” thinking everything would be best if we all just did our own thing and ignored everyone else…starting to sound familiar?

Fandom libertarians, then, would be the people who insist that if everyone just did the fannish things they wanted to do and stayed out of everyone else’s business, we would all have a great time in fandom. And just like with political libertarianism, that sounds pretty good on the surface.

And here’s where we get to social contract theory. Because in addition to thinking libertarian politics would be ineffective, I also believe they violate the social contract underpinning American society.

Social contract theory has existed for basically as long as Western civilization has existed (and probably arguably even predates that, although that’s out of my realm of expertise). There is a lot of nuance and a lot of variation, but for the purposes of this essay, I’m mostly concerned with Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s version.

Rousseau interpreted the social contract not just as an agreement between individuals and a ruler for the sake of protecting oneself from the State of Nature and death (the more Hobbesian view), but rather as a form of reciprocity between individuals and a ruler as well as between each individual. Rousseau believed that people could not both determine for themselves whether to fulfill their obligations to society based on their own interests and be allowed to reap the benefits of belonging to that society. This is basically the argument a lot of people use with libertarians — you don’t get to use roads, fire trucks, and other municipal services and refuse to pay your taxes.

One thing I (and many political theorists) would add to Rousseau is that in the 21st century, the social contract is not an opt-in contract. Unlike legal contracts, which you can choose to enter into or not, as soon as you are born into a society, you are part of that contract. As much as we might like to erase what we’ve got and start from scratch building society, we’ve got to start with where we are now (Even Rousseau talks about the impossibility of returning to the State of Nature in his work).

You can want it to be voluntary, you can argue that it should be voluntary, but ultimately, it’s not. Even if you have the ability to relocate and join a different society, you will then be a part of that society’s contract. We are all part of human society and that comes with certain responsibilities and requirements. There’s a lot of debate about what those responsibilities and requirements are, but only libertarians seem to think they shouldn’t actually exist.**

Fandom, on the other hand, is an opt-in community. You can choose whether or not you want to participate. Which is awesome! We all like having choices! And as many fandom libertarians will tell you, if you don’t like what’s happening in fandom, you can leave. Which is true.

However.

I would argue that if we choose to participate in fandom, we are also choosing to have some measure of responsibility for our fellow community members. If we don’t want that, we can opt out - we can make our blogs private, we can create a private subscription list for our fan works, etc. But by posting our fanworks in a public forum, by engaging in fandom activity openly online, we are agreeing to be a part of a community and all communities have guidelines and responsibilities.

Of course, we have a hard time determining what those responsibilities are even when we have laws and constitutions and things, so it’s not like something as fluid and unwieldy as fandom is going to have a codified list of rules and responsibilities outside of the terms and conditions of the platforms we use. But it boggles my mind that some people would then argue that they have no responsibility for the well-being of other community members at all.

And this is what bothers me about so much of the “Do whatever you want! People are responsible for their own experience!” side of fan culture. Yes, we can write/draw/do whatever we want. Yes, people should do what they can on their end to protect themselves. But we should also do what we can to help our community members protect themselves.

When someone claims they shouldn’t have to do that, all I can hear are the people who complain about paying taxes that they don’t benefit from or whine about having to include wheelchair ramps in their building plans or say that poor people should just work hard and get a good education. When fanwork creators call any and all criticism “policing,” all I can hear is people screaming “taxation is theft!”

And just like those people, when we refuse to make reasonable accommodations for our fellow fans — like tagging posts and fanworks accurately, avoiding racist/homophobic/transphobic tropes in our writing/art, listening when marginalized groups say something is harmful, etc. — we are actually harming our community. No one is advocating that we require people to have every single thing they create approved by a panel of judges, just like no one who wants single-payer healthcare is advocating for “death panels”. We just want to be a part of a fandom community that prioritizes minimizing harm to its members and freedom of expression.

I can already hear people screaming, “But who gets to decide???” And you know what? I don’t know the best answer to that. Here’s where that nuance that I talked about in the very first paragraph comes in. I believe that fandom communities have the capacity to navigate these gray areas respectfully and usefully without resorting to attacks or falling into the trap of fundamentalism. Maybe that’s overly idealistic of me, but well, my idealism is hard-won and refuse to give it up.

But I would also encourage us to remember that when it comes to issues of racism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism — anything outside the realm of personal preference — fandom is not immune from the power differentials that exist in the broader world. Which means that the burden is on those with more power — white fans, straight fans, cis fans, abled fans, etc. — to work to make their own positions more nuanced before demanding it of fans with marginalized identities (and to remember that people exist at the intersections of all of those identities as well, so that I don’t use my queer, mentally ill identity to excuse myself from doing the work my whiteness requires).

Of course, this post assumes that most of the people in fandom agree with me that libertarianism generally turns people into arrogant assholes who don’t give a shit about others. I might be wrong about that; maybe fandom is full of libertarians and think it’s absolutely right and good to bring libertarianism into fandom as well. I just wish libertarians, both in fandom and outside of it, would stop insisting that people should have complete freedom without any acknowledgement that 1) that freedom has the ability to hurt someone else and 2) not everyone has the same access to that freedom.

*Quotes are pulled directly from the Libertarian Party’s website

**Note: there are a lot of criticisms of social contract theory, often through a feminist and/or race-conscious lens, that believe the idea of a social contract is inherently flawed; those criticisms, however, have more to do with acknowledging the ways in which people other than straight white men have been excluded from these contracts, and actually argue for greater responsibility for other individuals in society.

[republicstandard]

Video Games Turned Me Into a Nazi

Hail The Guardian for saying what we're all thinking despite reams of academic data to the contrary. Games are far right tools of indoctrination. Every Head-Crab you crowbarred to death in Half-Life makes The Wall a few inches higher. Do you really think the aliens in that game were called 'Race X' for no reason? Wake up, racist gamers.

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"Although affected by context, video games have long focused on the expulsion of “aliens” (Space Invaders to XCOM), fear of impure infection (Half-Life to The Last of Us), border control (Missile Commander to Plants vs Zombies), territory acquisition (Command & Conquer to Splatoon), empire building (Civilization to Tropico), princess recovery (Mario to Zelda), and restoration of natural harmony (Sonic to FarmVille).

Second, video games put the user to work on an instinctual level, making the gamer feel impulsive agreement with these ideologies."

Sonic is a Nazi now. So writes Alfie Bown with a sub-par rehash of Sigmund Freud's most outdated ideas. This piece isn't going to be a slam dunk piece on how stupid that idea is; Twitter has already trampled it into the dust, and I'll splatter a few choice tweets like alien brain matter through this piece for your delectation. I want more to have a look beyond Alfie Bown and his reductive nonsense to the deeper tale. For years now we have talked about a certain pursuit being the Fountain of all Evil, corrupting the young and making the world a degenerate place. Bown is making an ideological argument instead of the intellectual one. There is an argument to be made that the ever-presence of technology as a whole has changed humans. Have you ever found yourself alone at a restaurant table and discovered you were suddenly online? This is followed by the not quite understood social faux-pas of someone returning from the bathroom whilst you are in the midst of tweet composition. Do you delay interaction with someone in the real world while you drop knowledge bombs on anime avatars? This applies to messages, Facebook, and yes mobile games are included. This is a conversation that should about what effect our technology has had on our attention span and our willingness to be alone with ourselves for any fraction of time- not that there are political ideologies being stealthed into our culture through shoot 'em ups that will make you a race realist.

Yes, you read that correctly, XCOM has xenophobic undertones; it doesn’t matter if your squad was a beacon of diversity or that you were defending yourself from a hostile alien force that sought out to violently subjugate humanity, those aliens represent refugees, silly!

— Bunty King ♔ (@realbuntyking) March 12, 2018

So, how is it that we still see claims of video games being the root of all evil? Because psychologically we are trapped in a confusing reality of polarized political opinions that are resistant to change. I don't know if any leftists read this magazine, but let me assure you- this isn't an attack on left ideology per se, though I have come to see incredibly dangerous flaws in that thinking. This mental cage we have built for society is not a left or right wing idea, it is a deeper concept, one of a purity test. The Christian Right burnt records by The Beatles, and racists attacked Elvis for bringing the corrupting power of Black music to White audiences. Now we see the Regressive Left building another filter through which to strain the dregs of culture, and this frame is fixated on trying to understand how people come to be woke on ideas like ingroup preference within ethnic groups, replacement migration, the Islamification of Europe and even that it is okay to be White.

The answer when you are viewing the world from a purely ideological perspective is of course that all the evil in the world comes from who you believe are your enemies. Bown believes that what he thinks of as conservative ideas like border control and sexual dimorphism are not just ideas to be contended with and argued against, but examples of impurity in society. As his own subheading states:

"Violent, isolationist and misogynist desires course through games – and push rightwing ideologies on players."

A better statement would be perhaps- violent, isolationist and misogynist experiences course through humanity itself. We might disagree with this and wish to become more than the animal we are, but this hierachy still exists! How we deal with this and reconcile the advanced mind of human beings with the animalistic, tribal desires of the beasts within is important. That might be a good question- instead, Bown projects behavioral traits onto people as a group through their shared activity- the classic GamerGate tactic which the records show doesn't work and makes you look rather silly in the process.

As we know,  Fritz Heider (1958) suggested that we have a tendency to give causal explanations for someone’s behavior, often by crediting either the situation or the person’s disposition- this is Attribution Theory. I hold this statement to be true, born out by observing reality as impartially as we can. You are a Nazi because I disagree with you and you are a Nazi because you do this unrelated action that I think made you into even more of a Nazi. This is the argument from the Left today- this is the anti-Gamer Gate argument, this is the argument that led to Martin Sellner, Brittany Pettibone and Lauren Southern being denied entry to the United Kingdom. It is this attitude that leads to Tommy Robinson being attacked in the street by masked men and the disruption of lectures by Carl Benjamin, Peter Boghossian, Christina Hoff Sommers and Jordan Peterson to name but a few.

Because these people are overtly opposed to broad church Progressivism, they are attributed with the trait of being a known fascist. This perspective is reinforced because they give speeches against Progressivism- that means, against authoritarian states, against neo-Marxism- they take actions that confirms their opinions, they are authentic in this manner, realized. That's the second attribution, now we have a physical and psychological image of who these people are in our minds, we know they are not just in disagreement, they act, and they are acting against us so they must be our enemies too and that is why we have to suppress or stop them. If you are familiar with Jeanette Falarca and her group By Any Means Necessary you will see how far this line of thinking will justify violence and harassment towards people who have been labeled as Nazis.

I was in his lair fighting him on a platform over lava, where the platform kept shifting, trying to throw us both off of it. I persevered, and as Iggy was thrown into the lava at the end of our battle, he shouted out, "have you read Mein Kampf?!" before slowly burning to death.

— Colin Moriarty (@notaxation) March 12, 2018

Attacking video games is a method leftists have struck on to try and explain to each other why their enemies exist. This indicates such a paucity of discourse between politically engaged people that we are looking at a discourse-less future of disagreement, and with the effective banning of right-wing opinions in totality in the United Kingdom, this future can only be violent.

Because someone disagrees with you does not make them an enemy that needs to be dehumanized and destroyed. Bown argues that video games can cause violent behavior along ideological lines as the themes in video games are not neo-Marxist. Well, isn't that just an expression that he feels that his ideology is losing in an arms race? I disagree with his premise, but surely his conclusion is the worst form of tribalism also.

"Currently, the new desires incubated by games lean far to the right, and without more progressive games on the market (though some are emerging), the future may be even bleaker than the political present."

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The link in that quote is to a Kotaku article about a video game that is about making a socialist society. It is not that Bown cares about the potential of technology (including video games) to alter humanity. He cares that technology is not being used to change humans in the right way according to his ideological beliefs. As a society we have to transcend this partisan thinking or at least find a neutral field in which our polarizing beliefs can engage with each other without descending into demonization. The survival of our civilization depends on it.

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