A blog about that Atlantic business, fandom, and politics. · 8:15pm Jul 7th, 2020
So, in light of a certain article that a certain paper recently printed that’s been going the rounds and drawing a lot of comment for… understandable reasons, I felt like trying to put my thoughts together. That was weeks ago. It took me that long. And since this is such a large and unwieldy topic I hardly know where to start.
Well. Let’s start at the beginning.
So, the first tablet of the Epic of Gilgamesh begins with the people lamenting that their king is abusing his power to torment them.
All of literature has been political since then.
What Is This About?
It is a common cry, when the ugliest parts of the world make themselves felt near us like this, that we should keep politics out of the fandom, that this should be a space free from such things, and that it’s sad that it is no longer so. This complaint always kind of baffles me because, well, because everything was always political to begin with, and do people just not realize that or what?
And it seems I can’t stop thinking about this until I get the thoughts out, and this blog is the result.
I’m not gonna lie, this may be pretty abstract and obtuse. I will be speaking in generalities and not naming names. Understand that I have extremely strong opinions, I’m just also super cautious about expressing them. This is partly because I’m a coward.
But it’s also because I want to try to understand underlying rules more than specific incidents. And as I tried to collect my thoughts I found that a lot of what I was writing down were the rules of culture war bullshit as I understand them and as I have observed them in the wild over the past decade.
This blog is divided into sections. It jumps around a lot. But hopefully, in the course of these… good grief… over three thousand words, it will come together and we’ll gain some sense of how and why these horrible things erupt, and why that article had to be written in the first place. So here goes.
Writing in a Culture.
We write fiction, and we take it for granted that we can explore anything in fiction. But every text is created within a culture. As the kids say, we live in a society.
MLP:FiM is a fantasy, and features no real locations or even human beings. But it is still unmistakably a product of the North American culture in which it was made, informed by the Western fantasy and mythical tradition, and it carries the values of that society within it. And to me terms like “values”, “culture”, “society” are all practically interchangeable with that other term, “politics”. Politics is the discussion of what our values, our culture, and our society should be like. They shape our politics and are shaped by it in turn, and we carry all of that with us whether we’re aware of it or not.
In the end every text is produced within a culture, and that culture has shaped the creator’s life in ways big and small that will have an effect on the text, whether the author consciously intended it or not. That’s not really in question. The question is, do we recognize how that happens and how to spot it?
We might not know much about what questions faced the people of ancient Sumeria in day to day life. But we know that the first story they copied extensively that survives to this day, albeit in fragments, begins with the people being oppressed by a bad king, and describes what it took for him to become a good king instead. We don’t know that any of the characters are based on specific people. But simply because the story resonated so much I think we can infer that these questions engaged people deeply.
So What About Fanfiction?
Fanfiction comes prepackaged with a whole sphere of reference of its own. In MLP that sphere includes a set of particular values and themes, as well as a world built around them which shapes and is shaped by them. That world and those values exist in relation to the real world we live in, and it links all these fanfics together in the shared space of this fandom.
Writing fanfiction means you get a whole lot of stuff for free. There’s a large fantasy world full of characters already constructed for you to work in, so you don’t need to make new things or explain it to the reader yourself unless you want to. But this also means you’re restricted by it.
Yes, theoretically you can tell any story in fanfiction. But going against the source material complicates your job significantly, because your fic exists not just in the space between your mind and the reader, but also between the source material, and the source material continues to shape how the reader views it. We have freedom to write whatever we want, but even here we are still surrounded by the complexities of our culture.
I’m actually struggling with this question right now, in my preparation for the next chapter I’m writing of The Seven Trials of Clover the Clever which uses a canon character who suddenly feels very different to me in light of recent real-life events. I could just use him true to the show, but then he would be at odds with my own values, and is that acceptable? I’m the one writing the story, and I have to sign off on everything it contains.
Of course, for MLP:FiM fanfiction specifically there’s another crucial element to that culture. While we have one sphere of reference handed to us by the show we also have another major sphere that came from a very different source: the adult fandom of MLP, including the fanfic community, arose on 4chan and inherited a lot of chan-type culture from it, which remains embedded in the fanfic community.
And that, I presume, is also where the subjects of that article came in originally. The dark side of the fandom was present right from the beginning.
Insider vs Outsider culture.
This one is a really big one, I think. I think about this one a lot.
Let’s establish this thing: bigotry doesn’t arise from individual, personal attitudes, but from large societal structures. Everyone’s a little bit racist, as the song says, not because we all just happen to have some unsavory personal opinions but because we are all products of a society, culture, and history that has the matter of race baked into its deepest structures.
Many years ago in the vaunted days of the blogosphere the biologist PZ Myers (at least I think it was him) wrote a little story I only vaguely remember now, but it was about the mouse and the lion: the mouse pulls a thorn from the lion’s paw, the lion is grateful, they become good friends. That’s where the normal story, that aims to instill good personal attitudes, stops. In Myers’ version the lion then invites the mouse to a party, and the party is full of lions talking about eating lesser creatures. And the mouse is very uncomfortable, which makes the lion very uncomfortable, and the lion can’t understand why the mouse has to make a big deal out of this after the lion was so grateful to invite it to the party.
Here’s something I’ve noticed. It’s easy to spot things that come at you from outside your field of cultural reference. Whether it’s behaviors, clothing, languages, or narrative devices. They stand out as abnormal, and draw attention to themselves, inviting critical scrutiny. Whereas things that come at you from within your own culture can easily escape notice, because your own culture feels natural and neutral, just part of life.
And, here’s an ugly reality, bigotry is always part of the dominant culture while the fight against bigotry is always part of marginalized outsider culture.
So if a culture war erupts between some part of your culture (even a terrible part) and an outside culture (even a sensible part) it’s easy to see the outsider as the aggressor creating conflict where there was no conflict before, and the thing they’re fighting against as just part of normal life, even if an unpleasant part. Even if you agree with the cause in principle it can still be very easy to think that they’re doing it wrong, or that the negative response it provokes is natural.
Because breaches of normality are more shocking, even if the normal situation is horrifying. Anything that the dominant culture does is defended, while everything marginalized culture does is condemned, almost regardless of the specifics.
Everything is political but one side’s politics are challenged immediately, while the other is ignored until it can’t be ignored any longer.
So the complaint, “keep politics out of the thing!” is not only misguided, because everything was always political, but also partisan because it hits one side harder than the other.
(ETA: I wrote an addendum to this section in the comments on the subject of discussions of racism.)
On the Neutrality of Rules.
This is a big thing with society in general and online platforms specifically: that rules are generally written to be neutral at face value. A lot of rules are still designed to help the unfairly marginalized, against hate speech and such. That’s good! But since the power still sits with the dominant culture, any rule is likely to be interpreted in ways most pleasing to them.
So a lot of rules aimed at helping to lift the marginalized instead end up used to give another leg up to the dominant, maintaining their elevated position above the marginalized the rule was intended to help.
For this reason I am wary at neutral-sounding rules. Sometimes the effect of “Let’s just treat everyone equally!” is that already-established inequalities are bolstered and defended, because any attempt to rectify them means treating some people differently.
And I appreciate the irony of saying that while I write this whole blog in non-specific terms.
To Each Their Own.
Part of the discourse of social harmony has traditionally been “To each their own”, an understanding that we can let people do things we dislike and it would be very rude to do or say anything about it… so long as nobody’s being hurt.
I have wondered if this tenet is breaking down over time. As our communications technology grows more powerful and becomes more intermingled with every aspect of our lives, the connections between us that were previously invisible and speculative are revealed for all to see. A result of that is the space of “so long as nobody’s being hurt” is shrinking. We live in an age of propaganda, dog whistles, cyber-harassment, and stochastic terrorism, where the line between speech and action is blurred.
We now know in much more detail how the butterfly flapping its wings creates a storm. In consequence those who want to prevent storms must try to regulate flaps, while those who want to make storms practice being butterflies.
On the retroactive ruining of childhood.
I find that two particular forces often interact in our media landscape, nowadays: that we live in a time of changing societal attitudes and a world of constant franchise reinvention, in which beloved classics are always getting sequels or remakes or spinoffs in a modernized mode.
And over the past decade many bitter culture wars have arisen across many fields of popular media because of this, sometimes to downright terrifying effect. And a recurring element of these culture wars is the claim that the new thing, unlike the timeless pristine original we enjoyed as children, has politics.
Children, of course, are poorly equipped to recognize political subtext in the things they watch. And many movies we enjoy as children go on to be remembered as beloved classics in our adult lives. We remember the effect they had on us as children. But we don’t remember the things that flew over our heads. And it seems like many people never really went back to look at old classics with adult eyes, or they would realize that all the things they enjoyed as kids were steeped with political subtext all along.
Individualism vs Institutionalism.
Stories are about people. More specifically, stories are about individuals. And this biases stories towards individualist themes and ideas.
In real life so many of the problems facing us in present day are caused by large-scale impersonal forces and require a coordinated societal response, and I think this is worth exploring in writing. But I think it’s very difficult to tell stories that address those things just because. How do you tell stories about grappling with institutional power when stories live or die on the wit and humanity of their characters, and when nobody wants to read a story about people always being powerless to make a difference?
People have always written about kings and heroes, and I wonder if this is the way people have tried to deal with that problem: to capture institutional power in an individual figure. But it skews our thinking. Even when we try the stories themselves end up being viewed not as institutional but as about exceptional individuals. As with Gilgamesh, those stories end up being about the personal character of the King, rather than about what monarchy does to a society.
On the Humanizing Power of Media Representation.
One of the great strengths of stories is that they allow us to see the world from a different point of view. A story invites us into the minds of its characters, or its author, and makes them real to us, and can open our eyes to parts of reality that are entirely outside of our own lived experience.
This is a big deal in general, but I think nowadays it feels more pressing than usual, and it’s something I believe in very strongly. I think that the simple act of putting a character of a particular identity in a story will make the reader view that character, and people like them, as human beings worthy of recognition and understanding, and that this is a powerful tool to change the way the public thinks.
I also think it cuts both ways, and like any other tool it can be used for better or worse. From what I’ve seen over the years, horrible extremists are always very eager for any chance to push their perspective in public, because they know the simple act of being commonly seen will make their views seem common. What we see in the world around us sets our expectations. And it’s why there’s currently a debate raging about the strange abundance of statues of past extremists in places of honor.
In my mind the rule, that I keep coming back to again and again, goes like this: “Depiction is inherently sympathetic.”
Gilgamesh begins the story as a tyrant and a rapist, who torments the people of Uruk and who must be stopped. But he is the main character while the people he torments are dropped in the background, and quickly the story bends towards humanizing him. And there it has remained ever since.
So if you care about where your audience’s sympathy should go, well, just be careful.
The Disconnect.
I don’t believe in neutrality. That’s pretty clear by now, I think.
Texts aren’t neutral. A text incorporates the viewpoints of the author in ways big and small, intended and otherwise. A reader who wants to look for them can recognize those things. We consider the values of the text, and ponder if they are the values of the author. We judge by what we have available, after all.
At the same time… Look, language is the main medium we have to communicate our meanings, but it’s an imperfect medium. If I send a message to you you may receive the same words I sent, but what they mean to you might be radically different from what they meant to me, and I may fail completely to communicate my meaning.
We only understand new things in light of what we already know. That makes it very difficult to tell someone something entirely new. And how an audience member understands a text depends in large part not on what the author puts in the text but on what the audience already understands.
You don’t need to share someone’s values in order to enjoy their story. In fact, in terms of pure enjoyment it might actually help if you’re not actively aware of their values. That frees you to interpret the text however you want, in accordance with your own values rather than theirs.
And that’s one way misinterpretation happens, and it’s one way you get an audience that seems wildly at odds with the plain values of the text.
Like, say, a show about cartoon horses that teaches acceptance and understanding and kindness and how diversity makes us strong then getting fans whose values are… not that.
It doesn’t have to be accidental. Deliberate co-opting of texts by people who actively oppose the creator’s values can happen, especially when sinister people are involved. Any respected thing will be subject to people trying to leech that respect for their own purposes.
As a writer, I don’t know what to do about this. I generally think that things are very troubled, and I want to broaden the audience’s mind. But a study of literary history makes me pretty doubtful about my chances. It is easy to interpret a subversive text in a manner that reinforces what it meant to subvert. The sharp edges will be smoothed down over time, and the dominant culture will arrive at an interpretation that flatters rather than challenges their values.
If, no matter what I write, the meaning of it will be determined by readers who prefer if it means something else, then what can I do? I don’t know.
At the end of Gilgamesh’s voyage the sage Uta-Napishti, the great-granddaddy of all literary wizards, advises him to stop chasing after immortality and adventure, and focus on being a good ruler instead. Gilgamesh returns to Uruk in failure, and marvels at the strength and greatness of the city.
The first story ever written begins and ends with the challenges of human beings living in a society. And yet it’s the journey to the godly realms that we remember, and that we retell.
Conclusion.
Well, that was over 3k words. And yet it’s only scratching the surface. These sections were written piecemeal, and it’s honestly difficult to tell even which order to put them in, lest their meanings change.
At the end of the day these culture wars aren’t about whether this or that text is political, or realistic, or good. They’re about what our values should be, who gets to be heard, and whose perspective is accepted and seen as legitimate. That is the question that article has raised, and that the community is facing.
My goal is always to be on the side of the disenfranchised, not because I think they are better people or that their opinions are always factually correct but because I want to move in the right direction, towards a more just and fair world, and that is what that looks like.
I’m no good at activism or protest. I’m a reclusive stay-at-home introvert. But I try to do what I can. And what I do here is write stories, so I think about what is the best way to do that a whole lot. And my approach to that is that I look at stories and try to understand how they carry the culture and values of their creators, in ways big and small. To try to figure out the best way to send the best message, to do the most good, and to not be co-opted by bad actors. Because sadly that can happen, in this world.
And as you can see I think that’s a very difficult and complicated question to answer. We must work at it, and that work can be painful and unpleasant.
Black Lives Matter. Ban the nazis. Listen to the marginalized. Support the struggling.
-Daedalus Aegle.
PS: I wrote this essay to try to explore and put into words how bigotry, oppression, and racism functions. I am not interested in debating whether or not it exists, or is a big deal.
Oh, this should be good.
In my case, a combination of willful ignorance, denial of the obvious, and a different personal definition of "political."
No one notices their own accent until and unless someone else points it out.
I realize this is meant as rhetorical question, but there are two options: Either use subject matter so obviously heinous that no one will think you're being serious (see "A Modest Proposal,") or include an author's note that spells out "FYI, I think this is bad. Don't do the thing." Which does some damage to the artistic merit of the piece.
All told, a well-thought out and well-presented stance. Good on you for posting it.
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Oh, thanks for reminding me, I was also gonna post this:
By coincidence, while I was planning this blog Overly Sarcastic Productions released one of their Trope Talk videos about character accents, and how modes of speech are used for characterization and how complicated that process is. It notes how characters who are part of the story’s dominant culture, like the English in Dracula, tend to speak in language of dominant culture that seems neutral while outsiders tend to speak very differently to emphasize their position as outsiders.
Language is the main tool we have for communication, but language itself isn’t neutral either and privileges some voices over others.
I hate to tell you this, but those are no guarantee either. People do misunderstand A Modest Proposal. If people disagree with the message they'll find a way somehow.
Thanks for reading. Just posting it is kinda nerve-wracking.
If anyone has material possessions and sees a brother or sister in need but has no pity on them, how can the love of God be in that person? Dear children, let us not love with words or speech but with actions and in truth.
— 1 John 3:17
(To be honest, the KJV that I learned as a child is a lot more difficult to understand. I like this translation better.)
Thank you for the wonderfully thoughtful and well-reasoned piece! I wish I was up to praising it adequately.
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This is becoming nearly impossible to do.
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All the believers were together and had everything in common.
--Acts 2:44.
(On the urging of my sister the religious scholar, who thought it would be funny
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I don't have the words for it right now myself. It was a piece of work, alright.
Thanks for reading, and for encouraging me to go ahead with it.
This is very, very good. Well spoken.
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Thanks!
(I said I'd do it! It just took a while.)
It is not evil we should fear but good. When people are in the service of a greater good then everything becomes permissible.
Excellent blog. Bravo.
I was gonna say some of the parts of this blog I thought were really well written, but then I saw FoME had quoted my favorite bits already. So I'll just say that this was really good! Thanks for writing this.
Black lives matter!
Thank for your thoughts
Excellently put. I don't know how people can honestly complain about modern reboots and reimaginings having politics in it while keeping a straight face. They have blinders on when it comes to political content in older works. Star Trek is an example of this. Aside from the blatantly political themes and ideas that have always been in the show, I recall how on the original show, they went as far as to feature one of the first interracial kisses on TV. And currently, we have capital-G Gamers complaining about "politics" in The Last of Us while adoring series like Metal Gear Solid or Bioshock. Even if if was possible to avoid politics entirely, I don't see how that would be desirable. Do we really want our media to be purely for mindless entertainment?
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As a kid, I actually believed that Americans didn't have accents. Or rather, that Americans in the part of the country I lived in didn't have accents.
Thank you!
Couplea thoughts regarding specific points:
IMHO, it’s acceptable to have characters who are wholly or in part at odds with the author’s values. I’ve done it before, and not only for villains but also for main characters. I don’t think that putting your name on something as an author should mean that you approve of every single character’s actions and/or thoughts in the story. Like, I wrote a story where a unicorn’s working for the mob, disposing of bodies, and let’s be honest basically every main character in that story is not a nice person . . . I’d like to think that people who’ve read it didn’t have as their main takeaway that Admiral Biscuit is pro organized crime.
When I’m writing actual facts, I try and be as specific as possible so that my intended audience completely understands what I’m putting down. In fiction, though, I often want the audience to put their own spin on it. There are a lot of times that I don’t describe something as fully as I could or perhaps should, because I think one of the powers of writing is that I can make the audience imagine it in their head and I feel like giving it a more subtle touch is often more powerful for the reader. Does that mean that sometimes they interpret things differently than I did? You bet. Does that mean that sometimes they picture a scene in their head in a different way than I did? Absolutely.
I don’t think that you can write a work that’s so profound that it’s going to change everybody’s mind to your way of thinking, and I don’t think that you should try. I do think that you can write a work that might change one person’s life, and maybe that’s enough.
Short of magically changing human nature, there’s nothing you can do. One thing with having a lively comments section is that we get feedback on reader’s understanding of what we wrote in a way professional authors generally don’t, so I’ve gotten a front-row seat to a few stories where some readers tragically missed the point. Or frequently misspelled the name of a major protagonist, despite it only being four letters long and occurring probably well over a thousand times in the story.
I’ve had a reader comment on one of my stories that I should change who a protagonist hooks up with; he was apparently offended by her interest in an interspecies relationship. Probably for the best he ragequit before discovering she was also bisexual.
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That's ridiculous, us Kentucky folks don't have an accent. Ya'll are weird.
This is what frustrates me so often about certain well-meaning majority "allies" to the marginalized. If you are the kind of person (white, straight, cis, male) that this world is built for and around, you have spent your whole life experiencing a thing that marginalized people can literally only experience when they create spaces that exclude the majority. If you don't exclude the majority, they take over, by simple fact of being the majority!
And then the supposed allies say "but isn't that bigoted too?" and don't *get* why minority and marginalized groups want exclusive spaces and exclusive things.
(Sorry, current pet peeve.)
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I admit, it took me quite some time to adjust my mind from "That's normal" to "That's what's normal for me."
I generally agree. But sometimes the marginalized outsiders are people who ought to be. Like, ideally, that'd be the social position of Nazis. That is the position of certain groups who advocate for things that are rightfully considered abhorrent, including some forms of bigotry.
Thank you for your voice.
Prejudiced. Everyone is a little prejudiced. Because at the end (or base) of it all, there is an ape inside your brain that classifies that which is 'like you' as Ape and therefore safe, and that which is not like you as Not Ape and therefore unsafe and scary. Racism comes about when Apes start believing that Apes are better than Not Apes, or Apes not liking Not Apes. Then the Apes Not Liking Apes are slowly pushed out by the Apes That Like Not Apes... and then "not-liking-Not-Apes" becomes "Apes" and "liking/being-Not-Apes" becomes the new "Not-Ape".
Similar to your point on politics in storytelling, it's almost definitely older than the written word. If you study the oldest myths and histories of literally any peoples extant you'll find threads of "The people on this side of the river are Ape and the people on the other side of the river are Not-Ape." All the way back to "You're either Roman or an uncivilized Barbarian" and further. American Indian stories detail their myths and beliefs, but also histories of them fighting with the tribe that lives approximately thirty or forty miles distant, how their tribe is best and the other tribe(s) suck.
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Also don't forget that the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed not because people fucked or were sexual deviants (Lot offers the crowd wanting to see the angels his virgin daughter for their nefarious purposes if they'll only leave him the fuck alone) but because they were fat and rich and did not care for their fellow men. It pretty much literally said that they had enough to feed everyone but people starved.
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It's weird, there are times that I'm acutely aware of my accent. Normally I don't hear it, but sometimes it just gets really thick for some reason and frankly it's horrifying. I have a southern accent anyway, but it's like once in a while it goes full Cletus McRedneck and I hate how I sound when it does. I know it gets worse when I'm around some of my wife's relatives. Her cousin and his wife in particular. Forget "y'all" - with her it's "you'ns" and "you'nses". I've notice I even make a semi-conscious effort to counter my accent, for example avoiding "worsh" (wash) which was some common around me growing up. Also in how I pronounce "I" sounds - I go more for something that's closer to "aye" (somewhat Scottish sounding) that the (to me) harsher, more nasally variant which I can't really figure out how to write out, but seems more common in southern speech. I think I sound nasally in recordings anyway and it's simply appalling. Maybe it's because of the stereotypes that get associated with a southern accent and I don't want that association for myself.
Hmm. The impression I tend to get is that many people tend to view politics as something very abstracted, a series of abstruse philosophical nitpickings and the dry dealings and positioning of politicos somewhere off in the halls of power -- something distinct from "regular" culture, something that you shouldn't make a big deal of, something that doesn't concern us -- but that isn't what politics is, is it? Politics is... well, look at the origin of the word. Politiká, "affairs of the poleis", the affairs of the city. It is, quite simply, the manners in which societies organize themselves. It is the definition of all-pervading -- it is literally impossible for a society not to have internal politics of some type. If you could contrive to be a hermit, a monad entirely self-sufficient and detached from other people, then perhaps you would be apolitical.
There is also the simple fact that the laws of a country and the manners in which they are made, interpreted and enforced -- politics -- are inescapably the business, the very real concern, of everyone subject to them. Those dry conversations in the halls of power can be and are matters of life or death for those they affect, and those people can't really afford to ignore them or put such thoughts aside, can they? The simple ability to ignore politics, to think of them as something unimportant, is in my mind the greatest sign of luxury and privilege that there is.
But, as you said, people tend to think of their state as the neutral default -- my day-to-day isn't special, it's just how things are. And if politics isn't my day-to-day -- or, properly speaking, if thinking about politics isn't my day-to-day -- then any attempt to bring them to my awareness will seem like an invasion, an attempt to upset a peaceful status quo.
Allow me to say here a word of caution: Be sure to make good art in the pursuit of this goal. A lot of people who have things to say through art end up making low-quality propaganda that isn't fun. My suggestion is to let Steven Spielberg be your role model with this one:
I say this because I want to see you succeed. As the man said, "Nazis... I hate these guys."
Hmm... an intriguing post and one with a lot of good points, certainly. However, I do have... well, not problems, by any stretch, but it does bring to mind certain thoughts I've been having about things in this sphere. So, please don't think that I'm aiming any of this specifically at you, it's just, like you, I'm trying to get some of my thoughts down and in order.
You know, I sometimes wish that whenever someone engaged in any form of political debate either directly in the form of an argument or indirectly in the form of posting an opinion, a university professor would instantly materialize next to them just so they could say those three all-important words:
Define your terms.
So much modern political debate is incredibly frustrating because both sides use fundamentally different definitions for their words and not only refuse to agree on them, but automatically assume the other side is using their definitions.
For example, the term 'political'. Side One says everything is political and Side Two says not everything is. And this seems to be because Side One defines political as "having any kind of politically-related content, no matter how small or hard to find" and thinks Side Two believe that you can create a work totally disconnected from human and societal experience. Side Two, meanwhile, defines political as "having significant and obvious political content to the point where it can be regarded separately from other aspects of the story" and thinks that Side One truly believes that "the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog" is a deep critique on the prevalence of crime and the indolence of the workforce.
On a technical level, Side One is correct that it is impossible to completely divorce politics from one's mind and, thus, from one's creation. On a base level, Pong is founded on the idea of competition. But at the same time, Side Two would most like point out that even if that definition is technically correct, it's also not particularly useful because it means that the word 'political' is essentially meaningless. It could be easily replaced with "existent" or, well, "_". If you'll forgive me paraphrasing a quote from a movie with its own share of politics, "Everything's political... which is another way of saying nothing is." There needs to be either different degrees or different strains of 'political' for the term to have any meaning.
Of course, then Side One could say that what seems like a different degree could simply be because its closer to your own politics and you don't notice it, then Side Two could say that if there's no way to tell the difference between apolitical and your-political, then how do you know any given subject doesn't have more or less political content and then they get into an argument about what political content is and how that's defined and that's not even getting into Side Three, who think that nothing should ever be political and that some in Side One think Side Two are part of because they assume that believing in apolitical works and enjoying them with the understanding, right or wrong, that they are is the same as believing all works should be like that whether the creator wants it or not and of course, these "sides" aren't anything of the sort because in the effectively-infinite mesh of human psychology and sociology nothing is ever so clear-cut and ARRRGH...
Yeah, if I had a good answer to these sorts of disputes, I probably wouldn't be putting it in a comment on a Fimfiction blog.
But honestly, I can see both sides of the issue. Some people think that every act needs to be considered from the standpoint of how it affects the world and I can't really blame them for that. Some people simply want to be left alone to do things on their own terms and I can't really blame them either. I don't think either side should be simply dismissed, but I can't say I see a way to really reconcile them.
As for neutrality... well, again, it's a question of definitions. One can't be entirely without an opinion unless one is, in fact, a rock, but that necessarily doesn't mean one can't (not saying whether you actually can or can't, just that it doesn't necessarily follow from non-rock-neutrality) be neutral in the sense of not completely aligning with either side. In a sense, everybody's neutral because everyone thinks in unique ways that can't really be compared one another on any kind of meaningful spectrum. Again, not a useful definition, but technically correct. But is there an area in that multidimensioned spectrum that could be considered neutral and if so, where are the borderlines and do you have to be totally within them or simply balance out to within them and a hundred other questions...? That's not something that's likely to be conclusively proven any time soon.
One thing I do know, though? One doesn't have to be "on one side" to oppose a different side or fringe. While I know that I have a political position, I honestly don't give much thought about what it is and I don't feel I align with any one "side". But when it comes to banning actual nazis? Yeah, I'm all for it. Is that a political position? Obviously yes, but since it's an opinion shared by people all over much of the politcal spectrum, I don't feel it marries me to any one side or position. You don't have to be diametrically opposed to something to oppose it.
Wow, I just wrote nearly a thousand words without really saying anything. Well, at least if you ever feel like you can go on a bit, you can use this as a point of reference for what a real windbag looks like.
5303190
You're quite right, but I do wonder what is the path forward to a world where separate spaces aren't necessary. In some ways it can be a bit of a double edged sword. There are people who look at that and say "why do we need to include them in our (space)? They have their own so they obviously don't want to be here either." Which starts to have smells of the whole separate but equal mindset.
How do we move to a place where we CAN all share a space, learning from each other, enjoying each other's company and friendship, without the majority overrunning it? I honestly don't know, mainly because there are always people who will ruin things / play then to their own advantage no matter what.
5303024
Hazah! A man of culture!
*Blinks*. I’m sure there’s someone, but how many people read the whole (paper? Essay?) and finish it, and think that this thing that got published was serious?
Then again, there’s a rule that says unless you specifically say you are (not) serious, someone will always think the opposite whenever you post an extreme view, whether you’re mocking it or actually supporting it.
Regardless, good post. While I very strongly disagree with the notion that older media wasn’t political, I do get frustrated when a reboot is obnoxious or ham fisted with being “progressive,” because having a token minority just for the sake of being a minority (e.g. little to no characterization beyond that) is insulting and defeats the purpose. “Look we have a strong female characterTM” but they’re only strong and tough isn’t much, if any, better than some air headed girly princess. Toph is an excellent example of a strong female who isn’t one dimensional. Fallout: New Vegas is one of my favorite examples of minority characters: you meet several homosexual characters, and instead of being some defining feature it’s, get this: just their sexuality. They’re people too, which for 2011 was just a little ballsy. Course that’s also kind of easy to do when it’s a setting where your sexuality not mattering (much) is believable and you don’t have to address the fact that that aspect of them does have an impact on the way the world treats them, which most media can’t do.
5303303
Eh, not really. Racism, at least in the modern sense, is, along with the current sense of race, an invention. It’s because of greed, and sugar. Basically, while Americans think of cotton plantations when they think of slavery, the majority went to sugar plantations in Brazil and the Caribbean. Sugar plantations were obscenely profitable, so much so that new slaves were brought in rather than bringing over women or giving a damn about the quality of life for slaves. This presents some problems, since slavery was generally frowned upon (as I understand it) in Europe, and treating people that badly was too (after all, we just kill Jews, heretics, and witches, we don’t work them to death after killing a quarter of them on the voyage over). But, again, obscenely profitable. So, at some point, the idea that “race” also included your skin tone, and that darker skin tones were in some way inherently evil or lesser was born, and we’re still living with it today.
5303313
I feel you. I genuinely can’t here my accent, so that’s something I guess, but I cannot stand to hear myself played back because, while not southern, I sound like a dumbass, and as a fairly in athletic nerdy person, I hate sounding stupid.
A Letter on Justice and Open Debate
The below letter will be appearing in the Letters section of the magazine’s October issue. We welcome responses at letters@harpers.org
Our cultural institutions are facing a moment of trial. Powerful protests for racial and social justice are leading to overdue demands for police reform, along with wider calls for greater equality and inclusion across our society, not least in higher education, journalism, philanthropy, and the arts. But this needed reckoning has also intensified a new set of moral attitudes and political commitments that tend to weaken our norms of open debate and toleration of differences in favor of ideological conformity. As we applaud the first development, we also raise our voices against the second. The forces of illiberalism are gaining strength throughout the world and have a powerful ally in Donald Trump, who represents a real threat to democracy. But resistance must not be allowed to harden into its own brand of dogma or coercion—which right-wing demagogues are already exploiting. The democratic inclusion we want can be achieved only if we speak out against the intolerant climate that has set in on all sides.
The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted. While we have come to expect this on the radical right, censoriousness is also spreading more widely in our culture: an intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty. We uphold the value of robust and even caustic counter-speech from all quarters. But it is now all too common to hear calls for swift and severe retribution in response to perceived transgressions of speech and thought. More troubling still, institutional leaders, in a spirit of panicked damage control, are delivering hasty and disproportionate punishments instead of considered reforms. Editors are fired for running controversial pieces; books are withdrawn for alleged inauthenticity; journalists are barred from writing on certain topics; professors are investigated for quoting works of literature in class; a researcher is fired for circulating a peer-reviewed academic study; and the heads of organizations are ousted for what are sometimes just clumsy mistakes. Whatever the arguments around each particular incident, the result has been to steadily narrow the boundaries of what can be said without the threat of reprisal. We are already paying the price in greater risk aversion among writers, artists, and journalists who fear for their livelihoods if they depart from the consensus, or even lack sufficient zeal in agreement.
This stifling atmosphere will ultimately harm the most vital causes of our time. The restriction of debate, whether by a repressive government or an intolerant society, invariably hurts those who lack power and makes everyone less capable of democratic participation. The way to defeat bad ideas is by exposure, argument, and persuasion, not by trying to silence or wish them away. We refuse any false choice between justice and freedom, which cannot exist without each other. As writers we need a culture that leaves us room for experimentation, risk taking, and even mistakes. We need to preserve the possibility of good-faith disagreement without dire professional consequences. If we won’t defend the very thing on which our work depends, we shouldn’t expect the public or the state to defend it for us.
Elliot Ackerman
Saladin Ambar, Rutgers University
Martin Amis
Anne Applebaum
Marie Arana, author
Margaret Atwood
John Banville
Mia Bay, historian
Louis Begley, writer
Roger Berkowitz, Bard College
Paul Berman, writer
Sheri Berman, Barnard College
Reginald Dwayne Betts, poet
Neil Blair, agent
David W. Blight, Yale University
Jennifer Finney Boylan, author
David Bromwich
David Brooks, columnist
Ian Buruma, Bard College
Lea Carpenter
Noam Chomsky, MIT (emeritus)
Nicholas A. Christakis, Yale University
Roger Cohen, writer
Ambassador Frances D. Cook, ret.
Drucilla Cornell, Founder, uBuntu Project
Kamel Daoud
Meghan Daum, writer
Gerald Early, Washington University-St. Louis
Jeffrey Eugenides, writer
Dexter Filkins
Federico Finchelstein, The New School
Caitlin Flanagan
Richard T. Ford, Stanford Law School
Kmele Foster
David Frum, journalist
Francis Fukuyama, Stanford University
Atul Gawande, Harvard University
Todd Gitlin, Columbia University
Kim Ghattas
Malcolm Gladwell
Michelle Goldberg, columnist
Rebecca Goldstein, writer
Anthony Grafton, Princeton University
David Greenberg, Rutgers University
Linda Greenhouse
Rinne B. Groff, playwright
Sarah Haider, activist
Jonathan Haidt, NYU-Stern
Roya Hakakian, writer
Shadi Hamid, Brookings Institution
Jeet Heer, The Nation
Katie Herzog, podcast host
Susannah Heschel, Dartmouth College
Adam Hochschild, author
Arlie Russell Hochschild, author
Eva Hoffman, writer
Coleman Hughes, writer/Manhattan Institute
Hussein Ibish, Arab Gulf States Institute
Michael Ignatieff
Zaid Jilani, journalist
Bill T. Jones, New York Live Arts
Wendy Kaminer, writer
Matthew Karp, Princeton University
Garry Kasparov, Renew Democracy Initiative
Daniel Kehlmann, writer
Randall Kennedy
Khaled Khalifa, writer
Parag Khanna, author
Laura Kipnis, Northwestern University
Frances Kissling, Center for Health, Ethics, Social Policy
Enrique Krauze, historian
Anthony Kronman, Yale University
Joy Ladin, Yeshiva University
Nicholas Lemann, Columbia University
Mark Lilla, Columbia University
Susie Linfield, New York University
Damon Linker, writer
Dahlia Lithwick, Slate
Steven Lukes, New York University
John R. MacArthur, publisher, writer
Susan Madrak, writer
Phoebe Maltz Bovy, writer
Greil Marcus
Wynton Marsalis, Jazz at Lincoln Center
Kati Marton, author
Debra Maschek, scholar
Deirdre McCloskey, University of Illinois at Chicago
John McWhorter, Columbia University
Uday Mehta, City University of New York
Andrew Moravcsik, Princeton University
Yascha Mounk, Persuasion
Samuel Moyn, Yale University
Meera Nanda, writer and teacher
Cary Nelson, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Olivia Nuzzi, New York Magazine
Mark Oppenheimer, Yale University
Dael Orlandersmith, writer/performer
George Packer
Nell Irvin Painter, Princeton University (emerita)
Greg Pardlo, Rutgers University – Camden
Orlando Patterson, Harvard University
Steven Pinker, Harvard University
Letty Cottin Pogrebin
Katha Pollitt, writer
Claire Bond Potter, The New School
Taufiq Rahim, New America Foundation
Zia Haider Rahman, writer
Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen, University of Wisconsin
Jonathan Rauch, Brookings Institution/The Atlantic
Neil Roberts, political theorist
Melvin Rogers, Brown University
Kat Rosenfield, writer
Loretta J. Ross, Smith College
J.K. Rowling
Salman Rushdie, New York University
Karim Sadjadpour, Carnegie Endowment
Daryl Michael Scott, Howard University
Diana Senechal, teacher and writer
Jennifer Senior, columnist
Judith Shulevitz, writer
Jesse Singal, journalist
Anne-Marie Slaughter
Andrew Solomon, writer
Deborah Solomon, critic and biographer
Allison Stanger, Middlebury College
Paul Starr, American Prospect/Princeton University
Wendell Steavenson, writer
Gloria Steinem, writer and activist
Nadine Strossen, New York Law School
Ronald S. Sullivan Jr., Harvard Law School
Kian Tajbakhsh, Columbia University
Zephyr Teachout, Fordham University
Cynthia Tucker, University of South Alabama
Adaner Usmani, Harvard University
Chloe Valdary
Lucía Martínez Valdivia, Reed College
Helen Vendler, Harvard University
Judy B. Walzer
Michael Walzer
Eric K. Washington, historian
Caroline Weber, historian
Randi Weingarten, American Federation of Teachers
Bari Weiss
Sean Wilentz, Princeton University
Garry Wills
Thomas Chatterton Williams, writer
Robert F. Worth, journalist and author
Molly Worthen, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Matthew Yglesias
Emily Yoffe, journalist
Cathy Young, journalist
Fareed Zakaria
5303328
I do think shared spaces matter too! It's just that people need places to feel secure, places to breathe, places to not have to start explaining at "Black experiences 101" or "What exactly is this 'transgender' thing anyway?" or "which of you is the woman in your gay relationship?" or any of that.
I don't know exactly what the path forward looks like, admittedly. I just know that calling minorities trying to fight for a little room for themselves "just as bigoted" and going "we all need to be equal" or "I don't see color" or whatever isn't it.
See, this is why I enjoy reading your stuff. You are FAR more well spoken than I will ever be, able to articulate ideas and thoughts that I grasp, but just can't figure out how to put to words. Thank you.
5303123
Could you clarify this, please? I think I know what you're trying to say, but I want to make sure before I respond.
5303190
5303328
I think what you're trying to get at is a transition between the fight to exist and the fight to be accepted. I'm nowhere near as eloquent as Daedalus, but I'm hoping to get the ideas across. I'm going to use gay activism here, because I'm at least passingly familiar with it. Yes, I know there's a LOT more than just gay/straight, but for the purpose of this post, 'gay' is a catch-all for anything 'not straight'.
Up until the Stonewall Riots (and a little after), gay people were simply not allowed to exist. If you ('you' being the non-specific individual for the remainder of this) were anything other than straight, you didn't talk about it. You certainly didn't tell anybody. Society had no place for you. You would be shunned, hid, and on an irregular basis, disposed of. But in order to remove the oppression, you first have to have society even recognize that there is someone being oppressed. So you speak out. You shout "Look at me!" You march down Main Street in boy-toy leather gear throwing skittles at the bystanders and singing It's Raining Men. You MAKE society recognize you. Congratulations, now you exist. And everybody thinks you're a perverted freak.
So, now that you exist, you want to be accepted. You have to be seen as a normal part of everyday life. This is the tough part. How do you transition from forced recognition to a shrug of indifference? Instead of "Look at the gay! So much gay!" you are now going for "I am a person. Who happens to be gay." The previous struggle just to be recognized is now counter productive to your current struggle to be accepted. Of course, it's also not that simple. The struggle to exist hasn't quite ended. There currently exists both battles simultaneously, each effort undermining the other. You need to be different to exist, but you need to be normalized to be accepted.
5303270
What's with the down votes? Do you have people scouring FimFic just to find post of yours to hate on?
5303187
I can hear that...
5303351
Would not surprise me. I have been vocal lately on the topics of Nazis, racism, and bigotry. More likely that someone following Daedalus downvoted me for highlighting the part of the blog that was very clear and direct.
5303303
I really wish more Christians understood this about Sodom. The sin wasn't sexual. It was wanton cruelty and selfishness.
5303339
You're both right. The current ideas of race and racism are fairly modern. But xenophobia based on appearance is very much not.
Thank you for your voice.
5303354
Well then. Two can play this game. Count me in.
As Anatole France put it, in a way that has IMO never been equalled: "The Law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread."
5303342
This seems to be a good example of the sort of thing DA was talking about when he wrote,
Is the current spate of over-reactions a bad thing on an absolute scale? Yes, it certainly is in many, if not most cases. But the reaction is coming from marginalized and oppressed minorities (and their supporters) who have had to live with far worse. When a pendulum is pushed as far as it will go and then released, it won't come to a dead stop half-way along its arc. Asking for open debate free from consequences is something that might seem reasonable to the authors of this letter, but it will be seen as nothing but yet another attempt to shield advocates of prejudice and oppression by the people who have been marginalized and shut down all of their lives.
The phrase "Our cultural institutions..." is completely and utterly tone-deaf. Those institutions are instruments of the wealthy. Like any tool, those institutions can be used for good or ill, but historically they have always been used to preserve the wealth and privilege of the white, male, ruling class. Only massive protests have ever been successful at chipping away at that exclusivity. Over the past century or so, we have managed to lessen the "white" and the "male" qualifiers to a degree, but the rest still apply.
Those are my off-the-cuff thoughts, (and this is coming from someone who is wholly invested in the concept of free and open intellectual inquiry and debate!) In another time and place I would have been willing to add my name to the list of supporters, but this timing couldn't possibly be worse. I'm sure that when the letter is published, there will be similar sentiments expressed by people far more eloquent than I. Far from leading to more reasonable debate, this letter will only add fuel to the fire.
5303123
Comment of the day. Bellissimo!
5303363
I love that quote.
5303242 5303344
Yes. There's a huge difference between people who are marginalized because of some inborn attribute like ethnicity/sex/gender/orientation, and people who are marginalized because they follow an abhorrent political system that rightly makes people shun them.
5303372 5303342
Yeah... that letter came up yesterday on my twitter feed a lot, and let's just say the response was generally scornful. Sure seemed like a bunch of people in positions of high respect and influence getting very upset that regular people were criticizing them for their awful takes. Free speech isn't just for pundits and megastar authors.
Thanks for the comments, guys.
5303358
Huh. Didn’t know that about Sodom and Gomorrah.
Also, true, but xenophobia and racism are two very different animals. Related, sure, but very different.
5303351
I agree with everything he has said but I also am starting to get a little worried after a statue of Fredrick Douglass was destroyed that we might be getting out of hand in our quest to end racism, police brutality, equality for marginalized groups. I worry were getting to a point when stopping racism will become more hate filled than the hate monger themselves.
This has happened before time and time again in our quest to do good. The Communist Purge of the 50’s. The child molesting satanic panic of the 80’s comes especially to mind when no one really cared if the accused was innocent or guilty the accusation was enough. Who cares if we have to throw 1000 innocent people in jail as long as we get that one guilty person the end justified the means.
The book Animal Farm also is a good example. When by ending oppression we become even more oppressive. “Four legs good two legs better.”
5303358
Also the gang rape? I read that as being anti-gang rape more than homesexual.
To be honest, the Atlantic article about Nzzies in the pony world is a ratcheting Kafkatrap, which could have been written by inserting any particular fandom into the template and turning the crank on the machine. It is both intricate by its nature by every-so-smugly smearing the vast majority of fans, and crude by its reliance on innuendo and inference instead of direct evidence. (there is an intersection in the sets of All Bronies and All Nzzies, therefore...) It is as much of a non sequitur as finding a copy of Reader's Digest in a cannibal's home and declaring all subscribers are therefore people-carnivores, or finding Al Gore's book in the Unibomber house and saying all of his readers build bombs.
The Kafkatrapping comes into play if you try to respond and defend the fandom:
If you acknowledge the existence of rare Nzzies in the fandom and admit they are repugnant and should be shunned, you are only boosting the Atlantic article, admitting it is correct, and allowing the author to happily preen his virtue signaling about these weird people and their White Supremacist roots, et al...
If you call out the greater good of the fandom, how we have donated vast amounts (per capita) to worthwhile charities, helped the mental health of our members, and generally contributed to society in various ways, then you are a Denier, by your silence you are consenting to the violence and evil of the hated group, and therefore can be dismissed and criticized as an Apologist and Sympathizer, etc...
Either path is quicksand. The more you struggle, the more you are pulled down. Much like Wargames, the only way to win is not to play. I'm ignoring the ignorant twit who wrote the article. He and his little Nzzie buddies can all go take a flying leap.
One very notable pathology is a form of argument that, reduced to essence, runs like this: “Your refusal to acknowledge that you are guilty of {sin,racism,sexism, homophobia,oppression…} confirms that you are guilty of {sin,racism,sexism, homophobia,oppression…}.” I’ve been presented with enough instances of this recently that I’ve decided that it needs a name. I call this general style of argument “kafkatrapping”, and the above the Model A kafkatrap.
–Eric S. Raymond, “Kafkatrapping”
5303450
Well, I'm gonna oppose the nazis and feel confident that I'm doing the right thing.
5303383
Has it been confirmed who toppled that statue? It would not surprise me if it was some bunch of racist twits who then try to pin the blame on protesters.
I dispute this claim. For starters, I've been a fan since 2011, and I sure as hell didn't get here via that site. More broadly, I don't even think a majority of adult fans did. It's possible to make that claim for a few individuals, but this looks like a sweeping statement, and that sort of thing needs more rigorous substantiation.
5303485
Alright. Not every adult fan was on 4chan. But I think it's a commonly accepted fact that it was the major hub where the fandom incubated in the earliest days, before the other sites were built. The key point for my purposes is that it was a major influence on shaping the fandom's culture, and the signs of it are still visible.
5303402
To be honest, I think you're being astonishingly generous in calling it an argument when it's more of a confused ramble that barely gets within 100 miles of an actual point.
Thing is, though? You are absolutely correct that the "spectrum" is an near-infinitely complex space without any clear sides or directions. I intended to make that clear when I referred to it as a "multidimensional spectrum" (using the term spectrum simply because I couldn't think of a better term for it), but clearly I didn't manage it and for that I apologize. You are also entirely correct that in such a space, there aren't really any directions and, as such, no fundamentally neutral position.
However, I do want to call attention to one bit of your reply:
But then... neutral opinions do exist, they just exist in that specific context. In another context, they might not be neutral, but in that context, it can be considered neutral. I'm not saying there's such a thing as a universal neutral, but I think that context-specific neutrality does exist. In any given debate, there can be (doesn't have to be but can be) be a netural position. In fact, there can be a whole swath of opinions that don't fully align themselves with any given position. This is, again, what I was referring to when I said that, from a certain perspective, everything could be considered neutral due to the different thoughts and nuances, even if that's not a useful definition.
Believe me, I am under no illusions that, if I'm neutral in a given argument, that means I'm above such petty things as "opinions" and have acheived some quasi-mystical state of detached enlightenment. But even if that neutrality exists only in that specific debate between those specific people arguing those specific positions, that still means it exists, however minorly or fleetingly.
I should also point out that I'm definitely not saying that neutrality is inherently a good thing. There are definitely situations where neutrality is wrong - as I said, I'd argue that the issue of "Should we ban nazis?" is one of them. And, though I'm not convinced of it, one could certainly make the argument that it's always wrong. But even that presupposes that, in some capacity, it can exist.
5303467 No prob and more power to you. Just realize how easy it is in this Twitter world full of twits to confuse the issue and leave your conversational engage-ee with the mistaken concept that 'all Bronies are nzzies', much the same way as the meme 'all Bronies are pervs' got spread about so widely.
Standing in the public square and proclaiming, "I am not an apple tree" leads to observers thinking you're a tree. Or crazy.
5303473 Destructive idiots don't care. Trying to read complex motives into simple idiots never works.
It kind of seems like to me if there wasn't a problem in the fandom, the mass reaction wouldn't have happened. After all, if these images are truly only meant to be a joke or satire, than it behooves a comedian or satirist to recognize that these jokes or satire may not be recognized as such. Any work can either be satirical, or serious, but it's important to recognize that whether something *is* satirical or serious is less important than people's ability to identify it. If mapped to a confusion matrix, "It's satire" and "it's serious" are two binary outcomes from the intention of the artist/author. However, the correct categorization relies on the other person; do they correctly categorize satire and serious? Or do they make errors, mistaking something satirical for something serious, or something serious for satirical.
In an ideal system, the amount of false positives and false negatives are reduced to zero, and all things are sorted into their proper categories-- the system is both sensitive and precise, picking up all examples of x and correctly categorizing them as they actually are.
But the real world, especially with humans, is never so ideal. Real world systems will always error and categorize things incorrectly. It ultimately becomes a question of what the priorities for the system should be. For example, it's better for a covid-19 test to have a low specificity (many false positives) and a high sensitivity (low false negatives) than it is for a test to have high specificity (few false positives) and a low sensitivity (many false negatives). You of course want the test with high in both categories, but it's better to have people mistakenly isolating themselves than people mistakenly thinking they're okay, especially given they'll spread it.
Again, ideally, the viewer of any particular piece of art will correctly identify it as either 'satire' or 'serious', and react accordingly. However, in the real world I suspect people have both low sensitivity and low specificity; things that are truly satirical are often missed, and (worryingly) things that are actually serious are taken as satire. Which is at the heart of this mess.
The questions is: is it not acceptable for a system to be designs such that may catch some number of false satires in order to remove true serious things in support of nazism? But it goes further, and the burden is on the creator here; if they're truly making something satirical they should be asking themselves why it's being misinterpreted as serious? Perhaps they're not as good a satirist as they think themselves to be, or perhaps they are accidentally giving support to true believers who cannot identify the satire in the offering, and ask themselves if it's worth it.
5303549
Y'know something? All of your dancing around the issue and deflecting criticism and whataboutism would seem much more genuine if you had just once said that racism is a bad thing.
5303559
Satire is another one of those things I think a lot about (there was more that I cut from this blog that was a bit too far from the central points). But yeah, simply put: satire requires a clarity of purpose. Satire is a way of using art as a weapon to attack bad ideas, but it has to be clear about what it's attacking and why. It's not just saying something awful and then saying you were joking when people object.
Some years back there was a leak, or something, from the literal neo-nazi website the Daily Stormer, and one of the things that got dropped was the site's style guide. Because it had that. And one of the points in the style guide was to shroud everything in layers of irony and comedy to maintain plausible deniability. So yeah.
5303559
The thing is, we don't, and likely never will be able to have a system to determine satire from extremism. What we have is an ad hoc, ever-changing, un-homogenous cultural sense on the matter. And that's a process that operates and evolves in an environment where there are real, physical risks involved.
Accusations have been leveled that the identification of ill-intentioned words/art have become too sensitive (false positives). In a low-risk environment, false positives may be more of an issue than the problem they are involved in identifying, and the charge of over-sensitivity would be worthy of concern.
But meanwhile, in the real world where members of a de facto underclass are regularly murdered by racist authorities and religious fanatics feel justified in attacking unarmed protestors with a machete? I think that worry over false-positives should be fairly far down on the to-do list.