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Oct. 30th, 2015 03:49 pmDREAMWIDTH has comments
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Oct. 28th, 2015 04:05 pmSomeone else please write the overactive-pattern-recognition post about scapegoating/call-out culture/Vriska-vs-Kankri as Bad SJWs/Gamzee being the goat. I have no brain cells left to house the discourse. They are all presently occupied by outrage about Kentucky politics and other people's Ruby code.
(#six days until we know which idiot is the governor #will it be screaming tea party man #puzzled fark-dot-com man #or a relentlessly-narcissistic early-90s-republican running as a democrat? #we lose regardless #we always lose #kentucky #is a doomed timeline)
(#six days until we know which idiot is the governor #will it be screaming tea party man #puzzled fark-dot-com man #or a relentlessly-narcissistic early-90s-republican running as a democrat? #we lose regardless #we always lose #kentucky #is a doomed timeline)
MsScribe Is Eternal
Oct. 28th, 2015 04:01 pmWritten as a response to these two posts, originally posted here.
The recent shitshows in the Steven Universe and Sherlock fandoms are very hard to distinguish from the infamous MsScribe Incident in Harry Potter fandom in the early 2000s.
When we talk about that now, we talk about MsScribe's sockpuppetry, and mostly kind of forget that she was just making use of a pre-existing moral panic about whether Harry/Ginny was a racist ship. There's a reason most of her "bad" sockpuppets were stereotypes of fundamentalist Christians.
Have those bad SJW kids developed time travel?! We have to stop them! They'll create a time paradox that will destroy Homestuck! We'll all be Superwholocks!
And that itself looked like any other moral panic. It doesn't matter whether the scapegoating is over racism or drug use or child abuse or sagging pants or Satanic ritual sacrifice! It's all connected.
In general:
* To scapegoat adults, the eternal surefire winner is accusing them of hurting other people's children.
If you don't have good data to support this but don't want to make stuff up (the mark of a quitter), you can always vagueify it like so: "they're just lazy and spoiled and have ruined everything for the next generation."
* To scapegoat kids, just say they hurt more vulnerable kids!
Vagueified: "they're just lazy and spoiled and are going to ruin everything for the next generation."
Some other good options for either: Having sex/relationships wrong (don't do sex stuff online, kids, that's gross and predatory and you're going to get innocent adults arrested), being religious/non-religious wrong, or engaging in some sort of "uncleanness" in terms of personal health and hygiene, food, or where they spend time.
As a note to all you scapegoating beginners trying to get your start - ritual uncleanness doesn't work as well as it used to in most places! These days, you go after people's dietary and exercise habits, their drugs/medications, and their hygiene products, on the basis of whether they're "natural"/"safe"/"healthy" or not and whether their stuff was made by a "good" company.
(#i'm helping #and the blood libel is always a winner of course #there will never be a society that won't buy into a blood libel against SOMEONE #i rate these things internally on a scale of 0 to 1492 blood libels #the 'artificial vanilla' thing was only like a hundred blood libels #which is not very many)
1) Run.
2) Rec me some sociology stuff about scapegoating and public shaming? I don't think I want to ask over there, it's Too Dangerous.
2) Rec me some sociology stuff about scapegoating and public shaming? I don't think I want to ask over there, it's Too Dangerous.
and I have no choice but to punish you.
You will lose your food meme privileges... for 1,000 years.
No cinnamon rolls, breadsticks, salt, Doritos, Cheetos, Mountain Dew, or usage of the word "thirsty" in any sense but the literal one.
You will lose your food meme privileges... for 1,000 years.
No cinnamon rolls, breadsticks, salt, Doritos, Cheetos, Mountain Dew, or usage of the word "thirsty" in any sense but the literal one.
as a rude appellation for people who hop into social justice movements for attention/perceived ease of access to the genitalia of their preferred gender(s)/money, is this:
If I were going to borrow terminology from surreal creepy-dude cliques, I would be borrowing from the actual fucking surrealists.
Not the MRAs! No.
I will be calling people who use that term Andalusian dogs from now on. Objections to this will be met with apparently-relevant quotations from The Theatre and Its Double that probably don't actually mean anything. This is a metaphor for your problems.
If I were going to borrow terminology from surreal creepy-dude cliques, I would be borrowing from the actual fucking surrealists.
Not the MRAs! No.
I will be calling people who use that term Andalusian dogs from now on. Objections to this will be met with apparently-relevant quotations from The Theatre and Its Double that probably don't actually mean anything. This is a metaphor for your problems.
So people on Tumblr have been reblogging this:
with several excitable laudatory remarks attached. I've seen it go past my dashboard several times, and today I decided to actually look this stuff up. No objection to the song or to Marconi Union - they seem like a perfectly normal bunch of ambient-music dudes - but there's no science behind this.
* The organization which helped the band create the song is The British Academy of Sound Therapy. It appears to consist mostly of Lyz Cooper, an alternative medicine practitioner with no medical credentials. Her other work includes a CD intended to help with "chakra balance":
She claims to have cured herself of ME/chronic fatigue syndrome by listening to specific sounds, which the Academy will presumably share with you if you book a private treatment session, in which they will help your "system to balance itself by releasing the denser energy that can hold the body in an unhealthy state." Okay, then.
* The study of the song's effectiveness was commissioned by a company called Radox Spa. They sell scented bubblebath.
* This study itself, if it ever took place, was ostensibly performed by Mindlab International. This is a marketing agency. They claim to specialize in manipulating consumers by means of something called "Neurometrix²":
I guess it's possible that an organization that would put that sentence on their website might be capable of performing credible research. I don't think it's likely.
They have a few samples of their work on their website:
Actually, let's zoom in on a specific document here:
It's only a one-page abstract, but if you don't want to download it, they conclude that recommendations from acquaintances - such as, say, Tumblr reblogs - are the best form of online exposure.
If they actually did have forty people (not a large sample size, incidentally) listen to this song to see what it did to their brains, they do not appear to have published the results of this experiment.
* Mindlab is owned by a psychologist named David Lewis, whose Wikipedia page sounds somewhat more like a press release than an encyclopedia entry. Going to go out on a limb and say that a marketing professional wrote it. But who?
Lewis's name stopped appearing in the edits for his own article after that revision, but the pattern will be recognizable to anyone who's tried to maintain a Wikipedia article about a person/organization with a marketing staff.
Scientists discover most relaxing tune ever
Sound therapists and Manchester band Marconi Union compiled the song. Scientists played it to 40 women and found it to be more effective at helping them relax than songs by Enya, Mozart and Coldplay. (read more)
with several excitable laudatory remarks attached. I've seen it go past my dashboard several times, and today I decided to actually look this stuff up. No objection to the song or to Marconi Union - they seem like a perfectly normal bunch of ambient-music dudes - but there's no science behind this.
* The organization which helped the band create the song is The British Academy of Sound Therapy. It appears to consist mostly of Lyz Cooper, an alternative medicine practitioner with no medical credentials. Her other work includes a CD intended to help with "chakra balance":
She claims to have cured herself of ME/chronic fatigue syndrome by listening to specific sounds, which the Academy will presumably share with you if you book a private treatment session, in which they will help your "system to balance itself by releasing the denser energy that can hold the body in an unhealthy state." Okay, then.
* The study of the song's effectiveness was commissioned by a company called Radox Spa. They sell scented bubblebath.
* This study itself, if it ever took place, was ostensibly performed by Mindlab International. This is a marketing agency. They claim to specialize in manipulating consumers by means of something called "Neurometrix²":
Our proprietary Neurometrix² technology will allow you to make better informed business decisions, improve sales and enhance brand efficiency.
I guess it's possible that an organization that would put that sentence on their website might be capable of performing credible research. I don't think it's likely.
They have a few samples of their work on their website:
Actually, let's zoom in on a specific document here:
It's only a one-page abstract, but if you don't want to download it, they conclude that recommendations from acquaintances - such as, say, Tumblr reblogs - are the best form of online exposure.
If they actually did have forty people (not a large sample size, incidentally) listen to this song to see what it did to their brains, they do not appear to have published the results of this experiment.
* Mindlab is owned by a psychologist named David Lewis, whose Wikipedia page sounds somewhat more like a press release than an encyclopedia entry. Going to go out on a limb and say that a marketing professional wrote it. But who?
Lewis's name stopped appearing in the edits for his own article after that revision, but the pattern will be recognizable to anyone who's tried to maintain a Wikipedia article about a person/organization with a marketing staff.
In this manner, I shall determine whether the variety of Bad I feel when a black/trans teenager on the internet goes
"ugh white/cis people are stupid"
is of the same density and composed of the same materials of the Bad that the teenager would feel if I were to say
"ugh black/trans people are stupid"
- wait, haha, I just remembered that I'm an adult! Never mind, of course it's not, can I still get the deposit back on that mass spectrometer? ...Well, then let's truck it over to Sephora, I'm going to solve the Nars Orgasm dupe problem once and for all.
Seriously, though: If you are over the age of twenty-one or so, and you feel personally hurt by immoderate expressions of outrage coming from disadvantaged teenagers, then the problem is you. Kids can't moderate their output. Telling them to stop saying rude stuff is like telling someone who's got a cold to stop sneezing, or telling a drunk person to stop driving so crooked.
Barring some sort of mass alteration of human biology, as if we were in a book by Octavia Butler or Iain M. Banks, teenagers are never going to stop saying stuff that offends adults, particularly adults whom they view as being outside of their own social group. Part of being an adult is learning not to take it personally. Tell a kid "wow that's kind of rude," if you feel so compelled - but Jesus H., if high school teachers got upset about this crap, there would never be class. There be only weeping. Miserable, endless weeping.
The school district is drowned in tears because Jakey "Buffalo Man!" Spenser said something particularly unkind about white women. The kids are all confused and damp. They expected sarcastic offers of detention and extra homework, like usual. Does this mean they get tomorrow off? No, tomorrow is a special assembly because everyone has to get a tetanus shot. This is what your cruel words have wrought, Spenser. Also, your nickname is stupid, at least take the exclamation point out of there.
"ugh white/cis people are stupid"
is of the same density and composed of the same materials of the Bad that the teenager would feel if I were to say
"ugh black/trans people are stupid"
- wait, haha, I just remembered that I'm an adult! Never mind, of course it's not, can I still get the deposit back on that mass spectrometer? ...Well, then let's truck it over to Sephora, I'm going to solve the Nars Orgasm dupe problem once and for all.
Seriously, though: If you are over the age of twenty-one or so, and you feel personally hurt by immoderate expressions of outrage coming from disadvantaged teenagers, then the problem is you. Kids can't moderate their output. Telling them to stop saying rude stuff is like telling someone who's got a cold to stop sneezing, or telling a drunk person to stop driving so crooked.
Barring some sort of mass alteration of human biology, as if we were in a book by Octavia Butler or Iain M. Banks, teenagers are never going to stop saying stuff that offends adults, particularly adults whom they view as being outside of their own social group. Part of being an adult is learning not to take it personally. Tell a kid "wow that's kind of rude," if you feel so compelled - but Jesus H., if high school teachers got upset about this crap, there would never be class. There be only weeping. Miserable, endless weeping.
The school district is drowned in tears because Jakey "Buffalo Man!" Spenser said something particularly unkind about white women. The kids are all confused and damp. They expected sarcastic offers of detention and extra homework, like usual. Does this mean they get tomorrow off? No, tomorrow is a special assembly because everyone has to get a tetanus shot. This is what your cruel words have wrought, Spenser. Also, your nickname is stupid, at least take the exclamation point out of there.
