#redefining the terms of the conversation as necessary to put the fool in their place

[whetstonefires]

Your paragraph on DHF being a bully is one of the best things I've read in fandom all year. It's been obvious for a while that she uses fandom social justice as a way to build a following and stroke her own ego, though I'm sure she believes she's some kind of crusader. She then uses the platform to intimidate others into trying to seek her approval. Thank god more people like you are seeing her bullshit and calling it out for what it is.

^^ Thanks for the support, nonnie. It helps. Little numbers showing up on the inbox has generally been deeply unfun today.

Yeah, ever since my one brief tangle I’ve mostly kept my mouth shut and been really careful when I have said anything, and I don’t mean to dedicate myself to pushing back against this kind of thing because I super don’t have the spoons for this kind of negativity on an ongoing basis. Augh, conflict.

But I haven’t been able to avoid noticing when I see that url go by (i’m now blacklisting it because it’s occurred to me that’s a thing you’re allowed to do with triggers) that my experience wasn’t an outlier; it was just a natural consequence of her standard style of engagement. And it’s. A really familiar pattern of authority-building. :/ Like, she’s not on the most extreme end, or I assume not, but it’s. Just. Enjoying the fight is one thing, but. There’s some good theory there, and a lot of pointless harm that cannot realistically achieve progress toward her stated goals, inasmuch as those are a thing.

So right at that moment, in the context of people already pointing out some of the existing issues with the rhetoric on the table, it felt like something that needed stated, for anybody else who was still going through the recovery arc I’d been working through for what, year and a half? Two? And needed validation.

And like...I don’t think she’s insincere. I think she is a crusader. It’s just. The Crusaders. Weren’t. Exactly a good thing to be?

I mean, there were cynical reasons for going on crusade, including ‘wouldn’t it be nice to have a big bloody fight where the collateral damage doesn’t threaten to impinge on my personal wealth base’ and ‘it will really boost my reputation stat with the serfs to be doing Heroism.’ Not to mention ‘the king says I have to.’

But a large proportion of the Crusaders, including many of the ones with selfish motives, had a very strong sense of what was right and wrong, and deeply believed that by going out and destroying the wrongbad things they could bring about a better world.

And they couldn’t. Mostly what they did was hurt a lot of people and temporarily boost their own power.

Between that time (or two?) they sacked Byzantium, and various times they targeted Arab Christians in the Levant because they couldn’t tell the difference and didn’t really care, a lot of the hurt was aimed at the very people-like-them they were supposed to be fighting to defend!

Now. I would say it’s possible to go out on a meaningful moral crusade, and by keeping an eye on your own conduct not leave a swathe of unnecessary and counterproductive destruction in your wake. People can do that. Advocacy can be really, really forceful and remain a force for good. Paladins aren’t totally fake, though due to the constraints of reality they’re never going to be pure from sin either.

And I’m definitely not saying people shouldn’t fight for causes like this.

(Causes like drawing attention to and trying to lessen endemic societal racism, I mean. Let’s please not talk about who has the right to control Jerusalem beyond ‘not the Crusaders.’)

But if we go forward assuming that just because the thing we’re fighting for is Good and so are we that this automatically means 1) our fighting will automatically have desirable results, without our needing to plan for that beyond locating targets to purge and accomplishing this and 2) actions such as ‘talking back when we issue orders’ or ‘questioning our assertions’ will only be done by Bad Enemies Who Deserve What They Get, and thus we don’t need to engage with unwelcome input on any deeper level than it takes to find the speaker’s weak points and destroy them...

Then we aren’t going to be the kind of crusader who gets more good shit accomplished than bad. We can’t. Even if we manage to refrain from sacking Byzantium, which we probably won’t.

It literally doesn’t matter what we’re fighting for and how right we are about how important it is. If we proceed from an authoritarian model keyed to destruction and coercion, our overall results will be bad.

This is especially true when the targeted group is internal and defined in sweeping ideological terms. :/