I have seen the future.

Congratulations! Of the many stupid things you could have chosen to say, you picked one, and managed to post it. Good for you!

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Daaamn, I had all kinds of tactics and things I was doing to fight against bigotry; but alas, none of them are going to end homophobia and racism forever and ever. Clearly I should abandon them and wait for that genie to arrive via mail order.

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One isolated act will not end the problem therefore we should never do anything ever.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_is_the_enemy_of_good

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...I think I've finally figured out what I'm writing a metaphor about. Thank you!

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Not only am I doing that but I'm also looking at his defenders. Lionsgate, Robert Orci and Harrison Ford have been the worst kind of bigot apologisers for this man. They have made every possible excuse, done everything they can to distract from his hatred. They are colluders.

Sadly I don't think it will sink Ender's Game because for every post I've seen from decent people declaring how they hate to support bigots who fund hate groups and advocate genocide, there are three wringing their hands and saying "oh but I just HAVE TO! But I feel guilty about it! Oh my sad sad guilt must be comforted with waffle fries! WOE!" and throwing money to him. And that's just the supposed allies, let alone the usual crowd of "rawr, free speech means you have to support bigots! HOW DARE YOU PRESUME TO USE FREE SPEECH TO CRITICISE HIM!!!!" and "JESUS'S LOVE MEANS HATE GROUPS ARE COOL!" crowd

But, still, I fight it because even if we can't sink the film, we have to refuse to support evil men like Card. We have to decide what WE are willing to stand for.

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Using this post as a springboard to post an observation I made recently...

I have come to realization that I really dislike knee-jerk variety of "use more free speech to counter hateful speech!" bit of advice.

Because according to my observations, most of the time...
...people uttering it aren't in targeted class of people (QILTBAG, other minority and/or disadvantaged class) , thus they are removed from the situation where actual "countering" of "hateful speech" (and its effects) is often co-opted by more practical solution of "get away before they pound the shit out of you"
...people uttering it have the economical and social class to not get discounted as "yet another disgruntled, never-happy minority"
...people uttering it share similar sort of background/class/etc with the original speaker, as opposed to the target of hateful speech, and thus maybe-possibly they could influence the said speaker to reconsider, whereas the target's chances are much more slim
...people uttering it don't follow with actual suggestions of what to do, or give suggestions that are actively insulting, or Celestia forbid, do not even consider offering help in countering the hatemongers even when asked to do so

In tl;dr, I've discovered that "more free speech vs hateful speech" crowd is all too often blissfully unaware of their privilege of being able to speak and to be heard.

Preemptive note for That One Person Who Inevitably Shows Up in Discussions Like These: No, this is not a call for censorship. It is an observation that "more free speech" is not equally free for everyone (I, for example, do not have an empire of TV and radio channels, which means that unless I become Omnipresent Woman, I cannot reach as wide audience as hatemongers can in a single sitting) and there are nuances to it that aren't easily reduced to a snappy soundbite and catchphrase regurgitated without further thought. I am pretty sure that I do include more in "actionable hateful speech" than That One Person Who Is Going to Show Up Any Second Now and Tell Me I Am Wrong. Chances are extremely good that a lot of stuff NOM has been doing are included in my idea of "actionable".

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Not only that, but on top of that it misses the vulnerabilities that exist between the Hate Speaker and the Marginalised Group they are targetting. Marginalised groups are, by definition, marginalised and vulnerable - hate speech means blood, hate speech means being dehumanising, hate speech means an attack to a core of the person and supporting systems that keep marginalised people as second class citizens or, even, disposable.

The whole "counter hate speech with more free speech" ignores that there is NOTHING I CAN SAY, as a gay person, that could damage Orson Scott Card, a straight, cis, white man, even close to the damage his hate speech causes. His privilege will always insulate him from the extreme effects of even the most vehement speech.

in the same way when a bigot starts ranting and throwing slurs at me, I can counter and write posts and shout and speak - but his use of slurs and dehumanisation is going to hurt me far more than my counters will hurt him - both societally and on a personal level with triggers and emotional investment.

And this is even IF both the marginalised person and the hate speaker had equal platforms

Edited Date: 2013-11-01 11:13 pm (UTC)

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100% this. +1. thumbup.png

It had always bothered me (minority member here too), but I couldn't dress it up in purty words regarding why or where the problem in it lies. And then, BAM!, it just came together like a really messed up and fractured crystal full of painful jagged edges.

I suppose I should "thank" a certain libertarian law-blog and its most insufferable prat for this "insight". (Hint: not bloody likely.)

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Precisely - the idea that we should respond to hate speech with free speech has several flaws:

1) It puts the two on equal footing as if in a debate and ignores that a) one is an attack while the other a defence and b) somethings should not be debateable (like whether torture is a good idea, whether the world is round, etc)

2) It assumes the marginalised person & allies has sufficient power and reach for their counter to be able to counter the hate speaker's

3) It ignores that hate speaker vs marginalised is a battle between someone in armour vs someone with open wounds.

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Ah, I see you've met Clark. Who is also a terrible person, but nowhere near as bad as Card.

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thornae.livejournal.com

... you know, as far as faint praise goes, "He's not as bad as Orson Scott Card" must be pretty damn high on the list.

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I find it quite telling that you immediately figured out what blog I meant and which person provoked my ire.

Really telling, mmmhmhmhmm.

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alienne.livejournal.com

Hah. I figured it out too. I actually LIKE Popehat, despite its being considerably to the right of me on most issues, because Ken White is a fucking hero and a couple of the other bloggers are also pretty interesting/awesome. But holy crap, Clark. Gaaah.

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Yes, Ken White is cool. The only reason why I read it. Yes, they do good things, defend freedom of speech and whatnot. But I really want to figure out if there's a way for me to never read that butt-head's blog entries and comments, it would make my world a better place.

Before the obligatory "But what about getting an opposing point of view, maybe you'll rethink your position!" question/cry comes up From That One Person Who Inevitably Always Shows Up (although I must note that the Person has been cheerfully absent, thank goodness for small favors), my answer is "Because I already get to read and hear it from people who are complete wastes of oxygen, I do not need to pile it on some more, this is where the word 'privilege' gets whipped out".

My funniest Clark moment, from the comments, paraphrased:
Clark: "Joss Whedon said mean things about NRA! BAWWWW 2nd Amendment! BAWWW what about 2nd Amendment!"
Ken: "NRA does not equal to 2nd Amendment [, you dingus]." (I imagine that he appended that in his mind, even if he didn't write it. If he didn't, I totally did.)

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Clark, like most Glibertarian/Lolbertarians[1] regularly doesn't bother to read or learn anything about a situation before weighing in on it based on his own ignorant prejudices.

Recently and relevantly to this post, he decided that objections to Card and to giving money to Ender's Game were obviously based on (shock! Horror!) that Card is a Mormon. And he maintained this particularly ignorant position until Ken showed up in the comments to point out that all the people telling Clark that he was a fuckwit who had no idea what he was talking about were once again right, that Card's bigotry goes far beyond "being a Mormon" into active acts, and that other Mormon artists like Brandon Sanderson and Stephanie Meyer don't get Card-level shit because they're not Card-level assholes, despite sharing membership in the same racist homophobic cult.

[1]: I can't decide which I like better

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Insert suitable emoticon expressing maximum hilariosity (with undertones of laughing because it is better than crying) being reached right here.

I probably should mosey that way to check out the recent shenanigans and see if there's more to Chronicles of Prenda Law.

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alienne.livejournal.com

Dunno when you last looked, but there was some extended Prenda hilarity a week or two ago!

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A magical Prenda gift has dropped this morning. (http://www.popehat.com/2013/11/06/another-hammer-drops-on-prenda-law/)

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Wohoo! Prenda shenanigans!

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Also:
But I really want to figure out if there's a way for me to never read that butt-head's blog entries and comments, it would make my world a better place.

This comes up often enough that Ken's threatened to make asking for it a ban-worthy offense over there. And yet, despite this and regularly needing to correct Clark's most basic errors of fact and logic, he still hasn't connected the dots.

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Yes... which is pretty sad, really. I'm sure that someone has done some clever Greasemonkey script or something, though.

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Thanks, I hadn't seen QUILTBAG before.

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rufinia.livejournal.com

I saw it on a preview pass a few nights ago. It's not good. It's, in fact, a hot mess.

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I saw a trailer today where they seemed to show the dirtification of the Bugger planet. How close to the end was that?

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rufinia.livejournal.com

At the end. There's some falling action involving psychic bugs, but yeah, that's the climax.

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rbarclay.livejournal.com

So, you think I should boycott this movie, and punish theatres showing it. I do think that in this case it's on you to convince me why I should do what you want.

Mind that all the background I have is that I read Ender's Game 20-ish years ago (maybe in translation, I can't recall), and remember it as "just another SF book", and that I've just skimmed the Ickypedia pages about Ender's Game (book&movie). So I actually have no idea as to why you're coming across as practically foaming at your mouth in righteous anger.

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Orson Scott Card is a horrible person. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orson_Scott_Card#Personal_views) Who uses his pulpit to do horrible things, and actively supports horrible causes. He's racist, sexist, homophobic, rich, and puts his money towards making the world a worse place.

AND the book has a whole lot of terrible messages.

AND the protagonist is a thinly veiled Hitler analogue, which in the sequels becomes "not veiled at all" as he escapes to Planet Brazil after genocidally murdering all the Insectoid Space Jews and expresses how bad he feels about it by appropriating their voice and writing a TRUE history of them. Because, y'know, now that he's killed all the Space Jews for reasons that seemed perfectly good at the time, he's free to fake his own death, escape to Planet Brazil, and explain how Space Jews weren't *actually* so bad. It's a classic Mormon "redemption narrative" applied to Adolf Hitler.

Edited Date: 2013-11-02 02:41 am (UTC)

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And a climate change denier.

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Santer and Mann are true believers. They don't need evidence. Evidence is just something you create to persuade other people.

Ah-eh-heh-heh.

Now, if we could get just a little self-reflection going...

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chaosrah.livejournal.com

Dammit, how did I not see any of those analogies when I read the series? (Except for "Planet Brazil", when I read about the piggy planet, that one actually made me say, are we getting uncreative now?) Musta been cus I was a kid. Ah well. Add more to the self-hating Jew pile, cus I still love the series. I agree, he's a dipshit, but I still love his books. And I totally wanna see the movie. >_< Retroactively, I totally see it, but it doesn't really ruin my enjoyment. I guess if you think about it too hard, it would..

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I suggest methods that won't put money into his pockets.

1) When it comes on DVD, buy it used.
2) Or you can acquire it via third definition of "free".¹

¹ "Free" as in "free speech", "free" as in "free beer", "free" as in "bittorrent".

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OSC liked it when homosexuality was illegal, because then the laws against it could be selectively enforced (man, aren't selectively enforced laws so cool?) "to send a clear message that those who flagrantly violate society's regulation of sexual behavior cannot be permitted to remain as acceptable, equal citizens within that society."

OSC wrote that last quoted sentence. He's since claimed that he totally wouldn't want homosexuality made illegal again, but any government that might be cool with gay marriage is his mortal enemy and he will "act to destroy that government and bring it down" (yeah, quoting again), and apparently sticks his fingers in his ears and screams LALALA at the idea that not all human history up until he started paying attention reflected his idea of "normal" society.

OSC thinks that if you're gay it's probably only because you were raped or molested or abused and feels very sorry for you, because you secretly know you're broken and want to be fixed. (You may need to wade through that one a bit; it's down in the Propaganda Mill section, a good ways past "the gays totally have marriage rights! they can marry anyone of the opposite sex that they want!") He really gets that you're a damaged freak, and he will explain to the world how pitiable you are.

(OSC tee-hees at the idea that you should ever take his inaccurate screeds seriously.)

OSC throws his money and his time and his effort into making sure that people aren't allowed to get married because Oh God They Can't BREED.

OSC is a hateful, hurtful man. I-- seriously, I have twice again as many examples, and I am not going to dig them all up because I want to go to bed and go to sleep and I am running out of cope for dealing with people's ability to be disgusting to each other. OSC's long-standing, deliberate, and concerted attempts to make sure that people should not be allowed to be "acceptable, equal citizens" because they have TEH GEY should result in foaming furious anger.

He is a competent writer; I have a great deal of respect for the construction of the stories in his short story collections. But I started being uncomfortable with the content of them a good ten years ago now, and the world is not actually that short on competent writers, so, uhm, no.

P.S.: OSC's novel Ender's Game has some incredibly creepy things to say about moral responsibility, boiling down to "intent, it's fucking magic" with a side order of "only evil people oppose Our Omniscient Hero". That is on top of OSC's novel cheerfully glossing over some really shockingly repellent levels of child abuse.

(I hear they may have taken those bits out. If they have, great. Then the entire plot is "the video game is actually a real war you didn't know you were fighting! You're special enough to save the world!" and I basically caught that in the first twenty minutes of The Last Starfighter. Cute cheesy SF movie. Came out in '84. May rewatch, as consumption of it (1) does not require modern movie theatre prices and (2) does not contribute to making the bigot OSC a more attractive property.)

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ardys-the-ghoul.livejournal.com

Okay, I knew Orson Scott Card was a waste of oxygen, but I didn't realize he was this level of slimeball.

I was considering seeing this movie (I've never read the book, despite being curious, partly due to the aforementioned slimeballitude of the author), but yeah, I won't be doing that, and I'm making sure none of my family and friends do, either.

It's hard to explain my feelings about this sort of hate. I don't precisely belong to a minority group, aside from being female, but homophobic shit enrages me in a way that feels very personal, even though it doesn't apply to me. Maybe it's because I have experienced being treated like trash because I was "different," but a part of me doesn't even want to say that--saying "I know how you feel" in this case feels short-sighted or shallow, because this is something you can't understand unless you've lived it. I hope that makes sense.

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I have an easy explanation to that feeling: all too often, when you scratch a homophobe, you will discover a raging misogynist underneath.

While not all misogynists are homophobes, the reverse tends to be true more often than not.

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I suspect there's some basic underlying assumptions about "appropriate" gender roles going...?

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It is possible; someone made a snappy catchphrase "homophobia is about your fear of being treated like you treat women". But that's a catchphrase, and those tend to be way too simplistic to catch the whole nuance of the situation.

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ardys-the-ghoul.livejournal.com

Simplistic or not, it's a good catchphrase. I like it, anyway...

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cleodhna.livejournal.com

Maybe it's because you are a decent person who abhors irrational hatred, full stop?

You don't have to be a victim of targeted abuse to be appalled by it. We, all of us, of every stripe, have the right to feel deeply offended by offensive gitbags spouting offensive gitbaggery. We should be offended.

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*ponders* I think I get the last paragraph. And yeah, I get the not wanting to... hrm. Appropriate someone else's pain, and presume to speak for them? (That's what I always feel I need to be careful of[1].)

It's still okay to be enraged and disgusted by this kind of hate. Something something empathy.
---
[1] To make it clear, no, that's not "I need to be careful because otherwise Some Imaginary Powerful Minority Will Yell At Me." That's "I need to be careful because I have had a whole lot of life experience in getting to be entitled, and I am trying to stop that shit."

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ardys-the-ghoul.livejournal.com

Being raised as a white Christian middle-class female, yeah, sometimes I'm afraid I might be "spoiled," so to speak. I could argue that I was raised Catholic in a place where there weren't many Catholics, but that's not exactly an inherent difference--at least, I don't consider myself Catholic anymore. It was never really "me."

What IS me is my inherently different brain chemistry--I'm on the autism spectrum, with the Condition-Formerly-Known-as-Asperger's-Syndrome. I'm used to being treated differently, either laughed at because I'm "weird" or handled with kid gloves--because I might break or something? I'm "not exactly" a minority because I'm not sure "autistic" counts as a minority--although I am a minority in the literal sense because I'm a woman with Asperger's Syndrome, and we aren't that common.

I'm...not sure exactly where I was going with that. Clarifying my position, I suppose. Maybe appreciating the irony that I can empathize with other people because I have a condition that is supposed to make me bad at empathizing?

Edited Date: 2013-11-05 10:23 am (UTC)

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chaosrah.livejournal.com

It almost humorous that I had to read Ender's Game in middle school for class. America. ;)

I still love it. But it's kind of fucked up. I almost want to say, do you give this to students to read to let them know that classrooms "could be worse"? Haha...

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