Terrible people celebrate Sessions confirmation with racism, gloating, more racism

I don’t get the apparent fury at people for actively not wanting to hurt other people. It never makes sense to me.

I get the impression that it’s because if I say I avoid using slur x because it hurts group y, they take this as an accusation that when they use slur x they’re in the wrong for doing so. Even if I’m not saying anything about them, they make it about them.

Just to add to the ongoing discussion of deeper meanings, I get the sense that some people really want their fictional universes to be a total fantasy, without any connection to the complex and murky reality they occupy. Star Wars is just a Campbellian space opera with a bunch of cool ships and lasers. Lord of the Rings is just sword and sorcery tale that they can inhabit for a few hours and discard when they feel like it. Just zero appreciation for the creative choices made that reflect on our society.

Rogue One was actually one of the films that I appreciated from the standpoint of historical parallels, parallels that none of the reviews I read picked up on. Urban uprising. Espionage. Guerilla warfare. WMDs. Even the dark waters of assassination were touched on in that film. But nope, CGI Tarkin was creepy, so booo!

I gotta lay some blame for this attitude at the f00t of one Phil Mason, whose crowing about science over humanities is what gave rise to the “reals over feels” nonsense you see in so many of these shitlords. I’m an engineer and I recognized the value in my humanities courses. Hell, my course in Science Fiction and Fantasy introduced me to Neil Gaiman, Robert Heinlein and Nalo Hopkinson. New ideas and new ways of thinking about the world. Literature, art, music… it’s important to study these things, no matter what your major is.

Shit, hand these guys a copy of Harrison Bergeron (or any Vonnegut for that matter) and I guarantee they misunderstand the themes.

Even the 80s comedy Real Genius had a great exchange that illustrated the issue quite well:

Chris: Yeah, and [Laslo Hollyfeld] used to be the number one stud around here in the 70’s. (whispers) Smarter than you and me put together.
Mitch: So what happened? Did he crack?
Chris: Yes, Mitch. He cracked, severely.
Mitch: Why?
Chris: He loved his work.
Mitch: Well what’s wrong with that.
Chris: There’s nothing wrong with that, but that’s all he did. He loved solving problems, he loved coming up with the answers. But, he thought that the answers were the answer for everything. Wrong. All Science no Philosophy. So then one day someone tells him that the stuff he’s making was killing people.
Mitch: So what’s your point? Are you saying I’m going to end up in a steam tunnel?
Chris: Yeah.
Mitch: What?
Chris: You are, if you keep up like this. Mitch, you don’t need to run away from here. When you’re smart people need you. Use your mind creatively.

@Gussie Jives
I love that movie. :3

@kupo Easily one of my favourites. It had a lightheartedness to it, even when it dealt with some serious subject matter, but it did it without insulting the intelligence of the audience. Even with a college comedy film from 1985, there’s plenty to analyze and examine.

@Gussie Jives

I gotta lay some blame for this attitude at the f00t of one Phil Mason, whose crowing about science over humanities is what gave rise to the “reals over feels” nonsense you see in so many of these shitlords. I’m an engineer and I recognized the value in my humanities courses. Hell, my course in Science Fiction and Fantasy introduced me to Neil Gaiman, Robert Heinlein and Nalo Hopkinson. New ideas and new ways of thinking about the world. Literature, art, music… it’s important to study these things, no matter what your major is.

This. Very much so. Quite a few people I’ve encountered, both in video game spaces and in my engineering school had this ridiculously level of condescension towards the arts. Science was perfectly flawless and the arts are useless wastes of time. Even one of my friends who studied game design took a while to even admit that his department was part of Humanities Arts and Social Sciences (HASS) at our school.

I think it shows up in gaming since video games are an art born from science (to a certain extent television/movies are too, although not as much).

@WWTH

Utterly disgusting in every single way. Domestic violence characterized as an act of ‘love’ is so vile.

EDIT: I kept reading. WHAT THE EVERLOVING FUCK? It’s ok for women to get beaten because they are ‘pseudo-scientifically more likely’ to give birth to boys?

Funny how these guys find various ways to claim their opponents are losers, then they identify with actual losers, the Confederacy. Sort of like the Nazi fanboys who love Hitler so much, despite his ultimate failure.

My own example in the same set as Scildfreja’s, and that of several of the rest of you was (once again) from my experience in the brony community. Before the Ponychan schism there were many people famous for being passionate and wordy that had strong feelings about how an episode of My Little Pony should be interpreted. One example that comes to mind was the meaning of “Tanks for the Memories“.

In that episode Rainbow Dash’s pet Tank had to hibernate for the winter because he was a tortoise. Rainbow Dash could not accept that her friend had to go away for a really long time by burying himself in the ground. Post schism (which birthed mlpchan) my friend was a moderator of a descendent of Ponychan (ponyville) and he wanted to ask my opinion about the episode in skype. I don’t precisely remember the question that prompted the conversation but they were arguing with others about the meaning. They thought that the meaning was supposed to represent someone with a disability and a parent that wanted them be different than they were.
I could see that my friend found personal meaning in that interpretation but the way they discussed the situation to me suggested that they needed other people to see it that way too. I told them that there are no true meanings in entertainment and when they are vague and symbolic they are more interesting because more than one meaning is possible. Everyone is right, and “right” is a set of common experiences.
On the innocent end this relates to parents that have to go away for a while (parents in the military for example) and how can deal with temporary loss. In a more serious versionTank burying himself in the ground and the way Rainbow Dash was crying could easily make the story appropriate for metaphors related to death.
People need a story to mean something to them personally (fragments of the story actually). Having other people share your view reinforces that meaning with an ill-defined social component. As a related concept I’m going to appeal to the Symbolic Function (related because it’s objective nature is fuzzy and this is a casual conversation).
[Your meaning] + [Their meaning]

Don’t forget that the link is about a small range of human development where we gain an ability that is preceded by other cognitive stages that involve simpler and more basic cognition. An ability that is followed by more stages later where other abilities appear (leading to memories contextualized by what came before, there is a lot more than puberty). That is also neglecting what looks increasingly like intergenerational patterns to development (this dovetails with a conversation in another thread, culture and developmental biology)

There are parts that overlap (common circuitry, anatomy, overall purpose for the instincts and related feelings of emotion) because this is about human communication social psychology and cognition. I think of them as metaphorically as being like algebra equations. We are individual independent variables and there is a diversity of dependent variables generated from a common underlying structure.

I can’t say precisely what Scildfreja’s friend was reacting to, but anger suggests a feeling of threat. Something in those interpretations were threatening (I also miss a lot of the specific symbolism in The Matrix, not all, but some). His reasons can only be indirectly known but “robot fights” is a similar reaction to “just trolling/joking”. My friend’s value from their interpretation was clear. They or someone they know is considered disabled and a caregiver wishes they were different or is trying to change them. And they feel it as a strong negative. And they wanted social support. I’m sure there is a way to satisfy everyone but it requires figuring this out in a human race sense.

Children’s shows break up into simple chunks when it comes to lessons and meanings and I saw people dissect that show for meaning and transform it with memes, fanfics, role-playing, iconic representation in conversation, video games. An image board is a social community. One of the earliest uses of MLP image macros was to troll people on 4chan’s /b/ board (the “asshole of the internet” where the “internet hate machine” lives). There were many people that could not stand to see conversations about liking that show. So they trolled /b/ with pony memes. And it worked, you can piss in the ocean of piss (the furries learned this first).

“Objectification” goes very deep when it comes to media and meaning. I suspect there are neurodiversity angles in the resulting cultural evolution (since we do exist as percentages in the 0.5%-5% range that contains the most commonly mentioned neurodevelopmental condition numbers).

Eventually Moot banned the bronies. And then changed his mind and gave them their own board (/mlp/, NSFW and TW for many reasons as of my last visit, these people think that trying to ban sexually explicit content is enough). Ponychan was born before /mlp/ but after the ban forced the bronies to create an image board in order to continue existing social relationships (Ponychan was seeded by /co/ (cartoons/animation) and /b/).

We use people in our language as a matter of course. How we do it matters. The functional use of other people in a group sense is a shared meaning, and the individual feeling of it prompts action through personal motivation, motivation from experiences including shared meaning with family/childhood culture.

Painting “autism” like a thing that stinks and should be removed is dehumanizing and does multiple things at once when it comes to potential evolutionary explanations. It repeatedly negs a community (You are the insult if you have the diagnosis). It name-calls a general set of things people don’t like on image boards to encourage group disapproval. It’s a disgust related behavior because it is involved in treating something as if it is to be rejected by the group.

Scildfreja, if anything else comes to mind maybe we can shave into your friends behavior a little more. I’m sure everyone has lots more examples of this which is good because social normalization cures bias.

There’s some angst in this thread. This scenario in the radical left stronghold of Salt Lake City should cheer you up:

GOP Congressman Jason Chaffetz Showered With Boos and Jeers in Roiling Town Hall Meeting

http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2017/02/09/republican_rep_chaffetz_booed_and_jeered_at_town_hall_meeting.html

To chip in on the subtext conversation:

From the guys like that (and yeah, I’m pretty sure it’s always been guys) that I’ve known, I think the aversion to deeper meaning is at least partially related to their desire to not be held accountable for their words/jokes/ etc. Using ableist, misogynist, racist, or all manner of other bigoted slurs is ok, because it’s “just a joke”. Sticks and stones and all that.

To them, it’s unreasonable and unfair to get on their case about it, because they don’t really MEAN anything by it. This is just the way they joke, man. If other people are offended by just words–which don’t really mean anything ofc–then that’s on those people for reading too much into it. And even worse, being asked to tone it down is horrifically unfair–this can’t be about showing consideration to others, because it’s not like people can legitimately be hurt by these words that don’t really mean anything–so this must just be a personal attack against the joker. How dare you tell me to change who I am when you can just stop reading into the things I’m saying. Etc.

So in order to buoy up the idea that saying *explicitly* awful things doesn’t really MEAN anything awful, then they of course can’t acknowledge that this piece of art/media, which is likely being somewhat more subtle or implicit in its message, can possibly mean anything. If dudebro can spout racist rhetoric just for teh lulz, then Neo can come back from the dead just for the special effects.

(And of course there’s also the thing of “I like this movie, therefore it can’t have a message that I don’t like because I don’t want to be challenged”, but I think that still kinda overlaps with “I should be able to say whatever I like without pushback”)

The villains of this election will always be the voters who were taken in by bigotry and empty rhetoric, and the GOP who for decades worked tirelessly to increase the support for bigotry of all kinds among voters.

I also believe that the Democratic party has failed in getting a coherent message out. I’m not talking about the Brocialists who will never be happy with any serious candidate no matter what, but there are many good reasons to dislike the Obama/Clinton wing of the party on ideological grounds. To be clear, people who feel this way are still to blame for voting 3rd “party” when so much was at stake.

I also believe that Clinton’s campaign had absolutely terrible strategy from the beginning of the primaries and on. I think they could, and maybe should, have won this election despite the misogyny and racism of voters. In short, they fucked up, but that’s not to say they would’ve won if they hadn’t fucked up. The racists would’ve still been just as racist. The misogynists would’ve still been just as misogynist.

The campaign failed. The strategy was a disaster. The primary voters preferred Hillary over any other candidate. The electoral system favors racist and misogynists. Hillary had to battle rampant misogyny as well as her opponent in the general election.

None of these statements are mutually exclusive.

This was always an unlikely outcome. 18 months ago, almost nobody expected Trump to win. Many (including myself) treated this outcome as an impossibility. Such an unlikely event probably had several major and minor contributing causes. Most of us, on this blog, believe that the wave of bigotry sweeping over the world was the main contributing factor. I don’t think we should ignore other factors. We can focus on more than one thing at a time.

I think Kootiepatra’s on to it there. With a lot of the GamerGate meltdowns throughout the internet, the rank and file gamers who through their lot in with the movement were upset that somehow feminists and cultural critics like Anita Sarkeesian were making value judgments about them due to their enjoyment of particular games. After all, if God of War is sexist, what does it say about me that I like the game and identify with Kratos? So anybody doing any kind of deeper analysis of the medium had to be hounded into silence.

The irony to me was always that their protests said more about them than merely enjoying a game that had a sexist protagonist. I enjoy media with quote-unquote “problematic” elements to ’em… I just make sure I recognize ’em when I see ’em. But the average Gater didn’t want to think about the implications of anything they were seeing–which should have them greeting such critiques with a shrug rather than a temper tantrum–so Anita Sarkeesian must be mocked and ridiculed into oblivion.

To heap irony upon irony, the same people who were crowing about how awful game journalists and cultural critics are for maligning poor innocent gamers are the same ones telling women to stop talking about “feelings”.

In short… there’s a strategy in their disengagement with deeper literary and cultural analysis. It’s to spare them the feelings of cognitive dissonance they believe they don’t have, while projecting them onto everyone else.

And I second PreuxFox’s explanation of the autistic silence thing. I’ve seen memes with the same stick figure with “autistic screeching” next to it. They just swapped in silence because of Elizabeth Warren. These are truely creative minds we’re dealing with. ?