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Here’s the video of the Al Jazeera English show featuring Helen Lewis and Rebecca Watson, among others, and me.

It’s  pretty good show. Most of the discussion involves social media researcher and Fordham professor Alice Marwick and Helen Lewis of the New Statesman. Those of us in the Google+ Hangout pop in briefly with comments and questions.

FWIW, I appear only briefly in the show proper, but I have a somewhat longer (and a bit more coherent) comment in the ten minute “online only” portion that immediately follows the show (and which is also on this video).

It was a somewhat strange, if educational, experience, my first appearance on TV. (The next time I get webcammed into a show, I won’t reflexively look down at the laptop while talking.) It all went by really, really quickly. Weirdly frantic behind the scenes as the producer tried to slot us all in.

The comments on the video on YouTube nicely  illustrate the problem we were discussing; that is, they are a rancid pile of misogynistic shitlordery.

My favorite comment is this one from Urhoboman5 about Rebecca Watson:

At 5;30 that chick has a youtube channel. Just type in rebecca feminist and you’ll find it. Interesting how most of her videos are voted down. Sometimes as much as 80% negative because the stuff she says is pure nonsense.

That’s right. He actually thinks that the fact that her videos are targeted by downvote squads proves that she’s wrong to talk about harassment. She’s harassed by dudes who don’t like her talking about harassment so therefore it’s “nonsense” for her to talk about harassment. Brilliant.

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howardbann1ster
howardbann1ster
12 years ago

@Plex Flexico: I’m frankly surprised that scrapemind was right about any details in there. Huh.

Plex Flexico
Plex Flexico
12 years ago

Honestly, so was I. As “they” say, though: Even a stopped clock is right at at least twice a day! (Three times when the clocks change.)

Falconer
Falconer
12 years ago

I guess it’s an ad hominem, but whenever I see this phrase, I think of the phrase “non-incest privilege.” I got the impression that Kinsey Hope/Genderbitch coined both phrases. Can it be true?

I have a few problems with “intent is not magic,” but they have to do with erasing the author and taking post-modern critique too far. I certainly concede that if I act the privileged asshole on the Internet, and manage to fling an elbow into a marginalized person’s eye (metaphorically), it’s no defense to me to say I didn’t mean to hurt anybody.

And if Mojo Jojo up there says “thugs!” it’s no defense to say “but I meant white ones!”

scrapemind
12 years ago

I googled “intent is fucking magnets” and got no results.

I’ve seen this “fucking magic” phrase a lot and had trouble believing that Genderbitch really coined it.

blitzgal
12 years ago

Rutee, what is your new picture? It looks like a doll but I don’t recognize it.

howardbann1ster
howardbann1ster
12 years ago

scrapemind, start with ‘magnets, how do they work.’

http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/fcking-magnets-how-do-they-work

Work backwards and forwards from them.

Ugh
Ugh
12 years ago

@scrape

It’s possible. It’s also a statement of common fucking sense. Again, do you believe that whoever coined it was incorrect, and intent is actually magic?

pecunium
12 years ago

I’m with Falconer on the way “intent is not magic” works, and it’s much the same problem. There are cases where intent matters; it doesn’t change that elbows can be sharp, and that hurt should be dealt with, but taken to it’s not-so logical extreme it does erase the author, and makes communication difficult.

What someone means to say does have effect on what is said; and that intent isn’t always irrelevant to the subject.

Falconer
Falconer
12 years ago

I googled “intent is fucking magnets” and got no results.

I’m hardly surprised, seeing as that isn’t quite the phrase.

(Who uses “intent is fucking magnets”?)

Try “intent is fucking magic.”

And I got the phrase from Shakesville, myself.

pecunium
12 years ago

srapemind: That’s because you have not an honest bone in your body, nor any honest intent.

For you, because of what I have seen from you, there is no good intent. You want to play, “lets you and them fight,” by tossing out little bombs in the hope that people will pick them up, and the tear into each other when they explode.

Falconer
Falconer
12 years ago

@pecunium — Oh thank all the gods in all the heavens everywhere, I’m glad it’s not just me.

Shadow
Shadow
12 years ago

Rutee!!! You’ve depokemoned!!!!

scrapemind
12 years ago

(Who uses “intent is fucking magnets”?)

A mash-up of Insane Clown Posse and a social justice blogger.

Falconer
Falconer
12 years ago

I mean, it just seems unfair to say that what matters is what the reader brings to a text, and then hold the author responsible for what the reader finds there, in all cases.

Allowing, of course, for readers to get exactly what the author meant to put there.

Shadow
Shadow
12 years ago

Re: “Intent, it’s not magic”

I think it’s accurate in what it conveys, though it’s not always used properly. The phrase itself doesn’t erase the importance of intent IMO, just points out that good intentions aren’t always enough. While I do take Falconer’s and pecunium’s point, like pecunium said, it’s the “not so logical extreme” that becomes problematic, and I think that usually comes from a point of disingenuity.

Falconer
Falconer
12 years ago

A mash-up of Insane Clown Posse and a social justice blogger.

Ah, so you do recognize the magnets line.

So, why were you attempting to Google a nonsense phrase as though it were a bombshell argument citation, again?

pecunium
12 years ago

Falconer: Because communication isn’t scrape’s goal.

howardbann1ster
howardbann1ster
12 years ago

@Falconer: Yeah, the real core of the ‘intent is not magic’ meme is that at the end of the day–well, Hershele Ostropoler put it best.

If you step on my foot, you need to get off my foot.

If you step on my foot without meaning to, you need to get off my foot.

If you step on my foot without realizing it, you need to get off my foot.

If everyone in your culture steps on feet, your culture is horrible, and you need to get off my foot.

If you have foot-stepping disease, and it makes you unaware you’re stepping on feet, you need to get off my foot. If an event has rules designed to keep people from stepping on feet, you need to follow them. If you think that even with the rules, you won’t be able to avoid stepping on people’s feet, absent yourself from the event until you work something out.

If you’re a serial foot-stepper, and you feel you’re entitled to step on people’s feet because you’re just that awesome and they’re not really people anyway, you’re a bad person and you don’t get to use any of those excuses, limited as they are. And moreover, you need to get off my foot.

howardbann1ster
howardbann1ster
12 years ago

Also, notice how scrapemind is going around and around the phrase to avoid the meat of it. Fairly disingenuous, that.

Falconer
Falconer
12 years ago

@howardbann1ster: Ah. Okay, I’ll disengage and go shower. I hope at least I made the pig happy.

If an event has rules designed to keep people from stepping on feet, you need to follow them.

And now I’m thinking of thunderf00t and his insistence that publishing rules about how you’re not allowed to step on feet at cons will make people think your con has a lot of foot-stepping, and then they won’t show up.

Far better to not have explicit rules about foot-stepping, and then complain when you get called on it, and when you get kicked out of the community you joined just to attack over foot-stepping rules, hack back into their private listserv and start leaking personal information, while denying that you believe in leaking personal information as a tactic.

I mean Jesus foot-stepping Christ, I’m sorry I ever watched any of his videos, now, no matter how much of a smug prick Kent Hovind is.

Gametime
Gametime
12 years ago

“RACIST HOMOPHOBIC BIGOT” is totes the new “vile.” Maybe Joe and Steele can get together and teach one another some new words! Y’know, assuming all the misandry and anti-white racism they face didn’t destroy their ability to communicate ideas.

Ithiliana
12 years ago

@Dear Asshole Joe:

racialized language being applied to religious groups is a Real Thing.

Studied. Analyzed. Discussed.

It exists.

Ur doing it.

The remedial version about racialized language: “race” is a social construct: that doesn’t mean it’s not “real” it means that it’s socially constructed through language. (There is no scientific support for the claim that there is a racial hierarchy with the white race being on top. Actual science shows there is a greater disparity, genetically, between all members of a single “race” than between random individuals of two different races–i.e. there are genetic differences, but they don’t prove the racist bullshit created over the past few centuries in the colonial industrialized nations).

Racism is a massive part of US and UK culture (differently realized). As a white person raised in a racist culture, I am a racist–but I am working (actively) to unpack my racist attitudes. It is quite possible for mixed race people to be bigots (in this approach, racism is tied to institutionalized power and is independent of individual ‘feelings”); it is possible for people in one marginalized ethnic/racial group to be bigots against other marginalized groups.

And your anti-Islam rants fit the textbook definition of racialized language applied to a stigmatized religious group.

So suck on your socks and STFU, ok?

katz
12 years ago

Oh, and Western culture is also superior because we make things like automobiles, computers, smart phones, and atom smashers. Heck, we can put people on the moon. We just put a rover on Mars. We’ve got a space station.

Believes in the superiority of Western culture + supports prison rape = really, really hates brown people, according to my calculations.

But wow, once you get Ruby on one train of thought, you absolutely can’t get her off. We should call her Ruby on Rails.

pecunium
12 years ago

Damn… Joe is moderated. I guess I will miss out on being a RACIST BIGOTED MORONN!!!! ELEVENTY!!!!!

My life will never be complete.

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