People like to say that Batman’s Rogue‘s Gallery is iconic because they’re all dark reflections of himself. This is bullshit, and I’ll tell ya why–it’s because they’re actually all dark reflections of American culture writ large.
Killer Croc has nothing to say about an old money white boy with parental abandonment and rage issues. He’s got everything to do with America’s fear of backwoods people. Similarly, Poison Ivy is about when militant ecofeminism gets real, Two Face is about the arbitrary and unjust nature of the American justice system, and Clayface is about the hollowness of celebrity culture. Harley Quinn is not the most popular female character in comics because she’s a twisted echo of something inside Batman; she’s popular because lots of women identify with being in an abusive relationship–notice how she’s become steadily more sympathetic as the writers embraced the implications of her backstory. And it keeps going. Scarecrow? Drugs. Mad Hatter? Date rape. The Joker? He’s about the most fundamental American fear of all. The fear of unbridled chaos, a problem that basically never exists, but which all white Americans are taught from birth to fear, and what White America fears sets the national agenda.
Admit it: nobody really gives a shit about Calendar Man. Nobody gives a shit about Man-Bat. Hush got boring fast. Why? Because none of these characters have anything to say about America. This is not to say that the scores and scores of creators who have worked on Batman-related titles over the decades were setting out to do a long-form collaborative deconstruction of the American id, far from it. I’m simply pointing out that the villains who have staying power, who matter at all to people outside the hardcore fans who love trivia? These villains all have something in common: very obvious symbolism about the American condition. Often, characters don’t pick up this extra layer until they’ve made multiple appearances and developed an extended motif, but you’ll notice that the villains who keep coming back decade after decade become less and less like people, and more and more like symbols.
Now if only I could figure out what the hell Mr. Freeze is supposed to be.
Hahaha, you get it? You get it? Because combined arms is a term for a kind of military action where many different sorts of weapons systems contribute, and brothers in arms is a term for an army, but because I’m me all the NPCs and squaddies are going to be women? Ya get it? Tell me I’m funny. Please.
Anyhow, I want a mech strategy game. We’re getting one, which is awesome, but as much as I love the BattleTech world, their focus has always been on the big stompy robots (They’re not robots! They’re mechs! Fake geek girl! Faaaaake!) to the virtual exclusion of all else, at least in the video game incarnations of the series. Tabletop BT was a little different, with lots of options for infantry, artillery, and tank support, but mainly it was about four to twelve battlemechs on a side slugging it out with each other until the mission was over. That’s fine. They’re great games, I love ’em to death.
But I want a mech combat game where the other combat arms aren’t window dressing and canon fodder. Where you take control of a company sized formation that includes all sorts of units, and each one of those units has a vital purpose. Sure, the mechs may be the stars of the show, but they’re not omnipotent and unassailable.
Here’s what I imagine: You’ve got your mech platoon, your tank platoon, and your infantry platoon. The mechs get the main work done. The tanks are nearly as powerful, and you get more of them besides, but they’re not as versatile and are not as good at spotting the enemy. Infantry are the only unit that can capture and hold objectives, and when they’re dug and have a good line of fire for their rockets, are nearly as powerful as tanks or mechs.
There’s no rock paper scissors in this game–any one of these unit types can be dangerous. But there is a consideration for using the right tool for the job. You don’t let your infantry lead an attack. You don’t let your tanks stray into rough terrain without recon to back them up. You don’t send your rock stars, your mecha, out on a sideshow errand.
Instead of going for a turn based game, I think it’d be fun to make this game real time tactics instead. But real time at a variable pace that can be paused, slowed down, or sped up at any time. You should never feel rushed playing.
Now, I said that I want combined arms, and I stick by that, but come on, giant robots are wicked sick, so the mechs would be the main part of the game. They’re the one platoon you can directly control. The other platoons under you are indirectly controlled by giving orders to the officers in charge. They accomplish the mission as best as they can, though since they were trained to fight as part of a company they will get anxious if you send them away from the main body of the company.
The art style for this should be cartoony, I think. This isn’t a grim macho game for grim macho grognards. People who are scared of bright colors should not play. Your subordinate officers have pop-up portraits when they acknowledge or react to your orders. Through these portraits and their voice acting, you get a sense of their morale, though you can check for yourself at any time as well. As you complete missions, they improve their skills and become more adept at accomplishing the tasks you set them.
The mechanics would aim for being quick to learn, tough to master. Realism–whatever that means once you’ve got giant robots in play–is eschewed in favor of clearly presented information and interesting choices. In real life, you don’t know if you’re well hidden until the enemy either spots you or fails to do so. For example, in this game, once you hide your guys in a copse of trees, they go all shadowy and dark. Lines of fire and lines of sight are clearly and easily displayed, without an overlay feature if possible. You get a preview of what your LOS will be if you move to a given position before you move there. I don’t ever want the player to regret a move on the basis that she didn’t know she wouldn’t be able to see or do what she wanted to do from that new position.
Everything about this game should be geared towards welcoming newbies into the fold, and then building them up to the level where they can be competitive in multiplayer, if that’s where they wish to go. If they choose to stay with the single player campaign and skirmish mode, that’s cool, too. To that end, the campaign should start with a very clear, very simple set of tools at hand, and then gradually up the complexity. Upping the complexity is NOT the same as bumping the difficulty, by the way. The game should start moderately difficult, and then end a bit more difficult. I don’t like single player strategy campaigns that are boring to start and a chore to finish, so that’s not going to happen here.
The single player campaign shouldn’t be too long, either. A big thing that scares newbies away from strategy games is their boasting about how long it takes to complete. I want this game to feel like a satisfying experience in 12 to 15 hours, with robust NG+, multiplayer, and skirmish mode options giving you extended replay options. If you want to put 200 hours into the game, that’s wonderful, but it shouldn’t be required just to finish it or feel like you’ve explored what the game has to offer.
I think a skirmish campaign feature might also be cool. You link a number of skirmish missions together into a dynamically generated (if, by necessity, narratively flat) mini-campaign that can be played in an afternoon. That way the strategic layer remains a relevant gameplay consideration over the long haul.
As for the story? I think that with the cartoonish art style and the nerdy affection for combined arms warfare, a project like this would greatly lend itself to goofy dark humor that doesn’t take the proceedings very seriously.
This isn’t the most cogent thing I’ve ever written. I just put 1500 words into my manuscript and my brain is kind of fried. But I wanted to get this up here.
I’ve got a problem. Every few weeks, I think of a video game that I urgently want to exist in the world. Unfortunately I am not in gamedev. Or maybe it’s very fortunate that I’m not; after all, games seems like a horrible industry to work in these days.
Regardless, I have decided to murder two avians with a single projectile: I’m going to write these ideas down here as they come. This will hopefully get them out of my head so they stop consuming precious creativity cycles in my brain, and also will provide easy fodder for me to increase my rate of posting here on this blog.
So without further hemming or hawing, here’s the first post of this series: Vampire Simulator 2017. (Do not expect creative titles for my game ideas.)
I got this idea while walking to a grocery store late at night. The nearby grocery store is open 24/7, and there’s basically no crime in my neighborhood, so it’s not unusual at all to see people walking around alone at midnight or even later. The town takes on a different cast by night. Mostly, it’s trees casting pools of infinite black in the moonlight, occasionally broken up by a yellow window in the darkness. I passed by a man’s house and saw his garage lit red and orange with night-vision protecting lights as he worked with some tools at a bench.
It’s beautiful, and a little spooky, and it reminded me of ARMA.
Okay, come back, I’ll get to the vampires soon, I promise.
Check out this video.
Pay special attention to the segment about how the lighting engine in ARMA is excellent for nighttime missions. How they have optimized it for large, outdoor spaces with many real time lights. Imagine an entire game played in that beautiful darkness, cut by all the lights and shadows of a modern city at night.
Now imagine how, instead of ARMA, the game is actually fun. Wouldn’t that be sick as hell? (As an aside: The problem with ARMA is that the campaign is buggy, the singleplayer is frustrating, and the controls are janky as fuck. You don’t know what killed you 90% of the time or what to do differently. You fight the controls as much as you use them. And when you’ve finally managed to achieve whatever Herculean task has been set to you in this particular scenario, there’s a 20% chance that the script will simply fail to fire and you’ll lose anyhow. Let’s wave a magic wand and say all those problems get fixed, okay?)
Imagine that instead of vast, howling wastelands where nobody lives and none of the buildings have furniture, the game map was focused on a segment of dense, urban terrain. Check out this map of Portland.
The black lines enclose a hypothetical game area. It’s about 217 square kilometers. ARMA 3’s big island, Altis, is 270 for comparison. Within these black borders, you have an incredibly diverse array of neighborhoods. There aren’t any real slums in Portland these days, but for the sake of gameplay, you could say that close in southeast was having a real bad case of urban blight or something if you really needed a rundown part of town. There’s nightclubs and warehouses, public service buildings and hospitals. Sleepy residential neighborhoods, and gleaming glass condo towers above hot nightlife districts. Let’s assume we have the technology to populate this place with enough NPCs to feel like a living, breathing city.
And then you wake up as a vampire in this city. You’ve got no friends, no job, no place to go back to. Hell you’re not even from Portland. But when you cross those borders you quickly come to realize–there’s no escaping Stumptown. Anywhere you cross out of the map, you get dumped back at some random other location, usually short on money and sporting some new wounds. Sometimes–very rarely–your little sojurns outside of PDX go well and you return home sated and with a bit more spending money. Most of the time, you run into the other denizens of the night who are not happy happy to see you. If you go into Wolf territory, it’s game over.
So you’re stuck here. And you’re dead. And the sun is coming up and oh fuck you’re burning oh god it hurts so much. And you get dragged into the shadows and kept alive by your sire, who gloats and sneers about how much you don’t know and how much you need her. Oh, she’s not going to help you for free, of course. In fact, she’s barely going to help you at all. But she’ll do you a solid to get you on your feet and then it’s sink or swim. She doesn’t need incompetent slaves. If you survive long enough to figure out how to be useful, she’ll have work for you. If not. Well. That’s a self-solving problem, isn’t it? But don’t think about going into business for yourself or (worse) for one of her rivals. Not until you’re ready to kill her–and buddy, she’s had a hundred years to get ready for you.
So now you’re at the meat of the game. Now you’re trying to survive. It’s a game of inches. Just get through the night. Find a place to stay when the killing star comes again. Grab a mouthful of blood when nobody’s looking. Understand that if you get caught or let anyone know you’re a vampire, you won’t survive long enough to regret it for too long.
You learn to hunt. You learn to roost. You learn to anticipate the patterns of mortal life, and how to insert yourself into them profitably. The day-night cycle is real time, and the calendar matters. Friday night downtown is very different than the warehouse district on Tuesday morning.
Soon enough you run into other vampires. Maybe they’re friendly. Maybe they’re not. Don’t worry about getting killed right away because you figure out fast that even among the Damned there are rules. The rules are not for your benefit. You’re okay with that right now, because at least they left you in good enough shape to crawl home. You get to that condemned storehouse you’ve been staying at, and fumble with broken fingers through your stuff. Her phone number is around here somewhere. She told you to call if you ever needed help and you’ll be damned if you–oh right. You’re Damned. You give her a call, she gloats, you bit your tongue and put up with it. Now the word is out that you’re one of hers. You can walk around without being jumped by other vamps. They still don’t want you in their territory, not unless you pay the toll, but in time you’ll find ways to finesse that.
In your feavered dreams during the day, you feel the Blood calling to you. You know what you must do now. You know what you must become. You could go out and greet the sun, but you know you’re not that strong. With a bracing dose of reality, you wake up to greet a new night. You will get your own back. You will learn to survive. One night at a time.
You could break into a house, drain the folks dry, sure. But you know by know that the next night, cops would be squatting the block like they own the place. That’s bad. You’re getting cagey now. Thinking two steps ahead. You break into a different house, ghoul the accountant that you find. Now you’ve got a named servant who goes about his business and generates you money. But your enemies are going to be looking for your servants; now you’ve got to protect him or lose face. So you go to a different neighborhood, a more dangerous one. You find someone who looks like they know how to fight. You mind probe them to be sure–yep, this one can throw down. Ghoul him, too. Now you tell him to be your account’s roommate. They hate each other, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is now your cash cow has a bodyguard and you don’t really have to worry about petty cash anymore.
Suddenly you have a real house to stay at. Suddenly you have a little bit of money.
Suddenly, the centuries stretch out before you, barren and empty of hope.
—————————
This game would have a plot and recurring NPCs and meaningful player choices, but a lot of the time you’d spend simply trying to get through the next night. You want to keep yourself to yourself, or else the vampire hunters might come after you. If the hunters come after you, so will the other vampires–they don’t need you pulling down heat on them.
Your sire openly despises you, but that’s okay because you figure out that she’s not the be-all, end-all of vampire society. In fact, the local society is having a bit of an uproar at the moment, and a canny young revenant could find himself or herself vaulted to dazzling heights of power if they play their cards right.
Vampires move at a glacial speed. Every month or so, there’s a real big party where all the bloodsuckers get together to pretend they don’t despise each other. This month passes in real time. You can spend every single one of those nights hunting, scheming, doing dirty deals. Or you can fast forward to the next exciting bit, and get some algorithmically generated choices to make so that you don’t get left behind by the world. You’ve got 2 years to get out from under your sire’s thumb. Or maybe a decade, who knows? Seasons pass and years turn.
You develop your powers as a hunter of the night. I don’t envision the leveling process in this game to be a straight progression of power from weak to strong, but rather a specialization process. There are different vampire archetypes you could choose to inhabit, and you develop your skills to support them. Certainly your elders are stronger than you, but maybe not so much as they’d like you to believe. Maybe it’s more that they have the home field advantage.
If this sounds a lot like Masquarade, well, yeah. I fucking LOVE Bloodlines, but I’d want this to be uniquely its own thing. In Bloodlines, the sun never rises. You’re always hustled from one quest to another. Your influence on the story is sadly undercut by a few segments of unforgivable railroading. Most of all, it’s missing that feel of quiet desperation. There’s never a reason to flee back to your haven, hoping they aren’t following you. There’s an easy to find black market gun dealer right downtown. Most of all, hunting is restricted to just one or two major strategies–get this mortal alone and drain him. What if I want to seduce someone in a club? Or straight up blackmail them? Or break into their house while they sleep, take what I need, and let them call in sick tomorrow?
This game would be less about a grand, operatic drama about the fate of the city (though that would certainly be a background theme) and more about the struggle to get to the end of the night, the end of the week, the end of the month in better shape than you started it. It’s about being able to walk down any given street in the city and know that you can take anything you see, anything you want, and it will never replace what you’re missing. This game would be about dark freedom and painful loss. About coming to realize that you’ll never smile in the sun again.
It would be about being a smoking hot vampire babe who gives absolutely zero fucks.
I want this game so bad I can taste it. Pity I don’t have the 40 million dollars needed to buy it.
The whole “Doctor’s Companion” thing kind of horrifies me. Let’s really sit down and examine what it implies.
You’re an ordinary person. Probably British. You’ve got a life worth living. You’ve got hopes and ambitions and dreams and talents, all of which only make sense in the context of the time and place in which you were born.
Then one day an old police box sets down in your vicinity, and a thing that looks like a man (also British) walks up and gives you the sales pitch. The sales pitch boils down to this:
“Hello! I’m a monstrously powerful alien, here to whisk you off on an adventure (That you cannot POSSIBLY understand well enough to provide informed consent for) to see all of time and space (until I get bored of you, or you die horribly)!”
And you, like a damn fool, say yes.
Even if you don’t die, and even if you return home to your family, you will be irrevocably traumatized by all the terrifying experiences you’ve been exposed to.
For the Doctor’s amusement.
And yet fans wish that the TARDIS would set down in their own back yards.
The Doctor has seduced an entire fandom into Stockholm Syndrome. The Doctor is pure evil. Hell, sometimes he even looks like Kilgrave! If you see a blue police box chilling out in your back yard, run the fuck away.
*Yes, I know he’s not called Doctor Who. I need those sweet, sweet SEO clicks.
Hey guys, awesome news! Yesterday I signed a two book deal with Diversion Books to publish Dreadnought and its sequel, tentatively titled Legion. Dreadnought is scheduled for publication in 2016.This is a huge step for me, the culmination of more than a decade of work, or about a third of my life to put that in perspective. I am excited and eager to see what comes next. I hope you’ll all pick up a copy of Dreadnought when it is available.
Lateral violence is when people within a marginal community take out their rage on each other. If you’ve witnessed an activist circle meltdown, you’ve probably seen it. The egos, the pain, the venom, the hurt. It boils down to a radioactive sludge that poisons everything it touches, until once vibrant communities become digital ghost towns, low-rez tumbleweeds blowing through ancient and abandoned threads.
(My blender has a metaphor mixing setting, and damn if I don’t enjoy it.)
At the beginning of 2014, there was a real sense of hope in the online feminist communities that I hang out in that we’d make real progress in confronting lateral violence. That didn’t happen, or if it did, it only seemed to be the results of an effort to circle the wagons against the screaming hate machine that erupted later that year. The root of the problem wasn’t pulled up; if anything, we’ve only become more insidious with each other.
But let’s get specific. What do I mean by lateral violence within marginalized communities? I mean points-scoring. I mean witch hunts. I mean the way the word “problematic” has been weaponized into a scarlet letter. I mean the way our social justice discourse has necrotized into a filthy ethos that encourages us to point the finger early, point the finger first, lest the finger be pointed at us.
I mean the way it’s strangling us.
Over and over we demand more representation, more marginalized creators, more voices from the edges. And these are good demands. We need more movies by women, and people of color, and queer folk. We need more books by women of color and trans folks. We need music by gay dudes and paintings by lesbians. We need more art from the edges, so that the kids at the edges growing up today will know they’re not alone. To see themselves embodied in all aspects of life, to help them find the strength to thrive in a world that too often wishes they weren’t around.
I cannot overemphasize how important this is to me. I wrote Dreadnought specifically so a scared trans girl could stumble across it on a library bookshelf and have something that, at least for a few hours, would help her feel powerful and important and worthwhile. To help her imagine a world in which she’d decide to stick around long enough to see what her twenties would be like. The money is secondary for me, as it is for many marginalized artists. We do this because we can’t not do it. Because we know what it was like to grow up with only a few scraps of culture that even acknowledged we existed, and because we want to ease that pain for the kids who come after us.
That’s why it breaks my heart that I can’t think of a single marginalized artist, writer, or creator that I am familiar with on a personal level who hasn’t expressed fear that someday they’re going to put a foot wrong and then—
–and then the mob will come for them.
We’re not talking about Gators when we have these hushed conversations. We talk about Gators and their ilk loudly, and in public. The conversations I’m talking about are hushed, as often as not. DMs, face-to-face, Gchat. Sometimes Twitter. Sometimes blogs with all the names stripped off. But very, very frequently with one eye over our shoulder, we speak about how our allies and compatriots sometimes scare us to death. Sometimes it feels like any friend can become an accuser. Any finger can be pointed right at our hearts, right through our chests, right down to our soul to damn us eternally in the eyes of our community. You know what I mean. You know what I’m talking about. You’ve seen it happen before. I say lateral violence because it’s precise, but what I really mean are social hit jobs, and they are especially devastating to members of marginalized communities who, once ejected from their support network, may have nowhere else to go.
Not only are the consequences more severe for marginalized people, but the chances of this happening seem to be higher, as well. The moment you stake your claim out as a queer writer (or a writer of color or a feminist writer or any other marginalized voice) you are stating your intention to become part of a tradition. It’s a proud tradition, and a vital one. It’s a statement that yes, there will be politics in your work, and you won’t shrink from that. It doesn’t demand that you write nothing but polemics or didactic just-so parables, but it does demand an awareness of who you are and where you’re writing from, and to my mind it can create some of the most beautiful art we have available to us.
But the blade has two sides. Because now, as a queer writer, you’re also expected to be better—for some value of better that varies from reader to reader, community to community, sometimes self-contradictory and always in flux—than those other writers, those plain old writer-writers. It’s okay for a writer-writer to fuck up, or if it’s not okay, there are allowances to be made. Sure Popular CisHet White Dude Author X makes all his female fans cringe when he writes chapters from a woman’s point of view, but hey, his plots are zippy and the dialog is fun, so we’ll ignore that. But should a self-identifying lesbian writer screw up a chapter from a gay man’s point of view, she cannot expect the same mercy. She should have known better. And the more marginalized groups a writer belongs to, the higher the standards she’s held to. We love to eat our own.
So not only are the consequences of lateral violence—both emotional and professional—more devastating, the very same forces that make marginalized writers and artists marginal in the first place make this lateral violence far, far more commonplace for us.
I do not know of a single writer who I know in a personal context who hasn’t expressed, at least privately, some doubt and fear that someday they will say something careless and be ruined for it. Or that something they write will be taken out of context, and they’ll be called to be “accountable” for it, whatever the hell accountability is supposed to mean in this context. Or even, yes, that someone who is an oversensitive ninny could decide to take out their insecurities on them. It’s happened. Don’t think it hasn’t. And the more marginal you are, the greater this fear tends to be. I know that it’s my biggest fear as a writer.
I’m not worried about never getting a fat contract. I don’t spend a lot of time twisting my apron over the fear that I’ll never leave a WorldCon with a rocket in my luggage. Sure I think about these things, but they don’t scare me. What scares me is the thought that one of my human flaws will be excavated from the deep sedimentary layers of the Internet, ripped from context and history, and spun out into a reputation-destroying dagger planted right in my back by someone I thought valued me as a member of their community. I think we can all think of an instance where we saw something like this happened. And if you can’t—well, have I got some bad fucking news for you!
This kind of thing is horrible enough when it isolates people from their social groups. People have been traumatized, ruined over this kind of thing. But when it destroys writers and artists personally and professionally, it contributes to the impoverishment of our culture. It pays the bullshit forward to the next generation by strangling our clearest marginalized voices before they can do their best work. It contributes to that blasted cultural wasteland that so many of us struggled to survive in when we were younger and still looking for our people.
For a long time, I resisted using the word violence to describe actions that don’t involve inflicting physical harm on people. In some ways, I still wish we had a better term for this, one that distinguished this kind of harm from bloodshed. But the anxiety I feel over this—that all my writer friends who aren’t straight, cisgender white dudes feel over this—doesn’t seem like it would come from something as innocuous as a few dirty words, a few unpleasant conversations. This is a poison right at the heart of our communities, and it makes me sick to think how many voices—perceptive, beautiful, lively voices—we’ve lost before we even got to hear them simply because some people decided it wasn’t worth the risk of seeing if anyone wanted to hear what they had to say.
There’s a new app coming out that is basically Yelp, but for individual humans who are just living their daily lives, not, you know, companies engaged in public-facing financial transactions. It will let you give people a 1 to 5 star review, as well as leave comments about them. It will let *anyone* who knows you do this.
The article I’ve linked above doesn’t quite do the situation justice, so I’ve included some line edits here for clarification (helpful additions in bold):
“We’re creating a platform that allows users to provide a rating and commentary on the people they come in contact with everyday, on a level that we haven’t seen before,” said Julia Cordray, ominously. The self-described “female, emphatic” CEO then paused for a high pitched and somehow disturbing giggle fit before continuing, “We feel this is the ultimate social experiment. Let’s look at everyone in the three ways you could possibly know someone — personally, professionally and romantically — and let the world rate them, while allowing yourself to be rated.”
She said the app will help people to better choose who they hire, do business with, date, let babysit their kids, become roommates with or teach their children, among other uses. When pressed on what those other uses could be, she only replied, “You know. OTHER uses.”
Users will log in through Facebook and provide a cellphone number to verify their identity. Co-founder Nicole McCullough was more or less able to suppress a fit of laughter while she explained the service’s security measures.
“The aim of our platform is to showcase a person’s true character,” said McCullough, with deadpan sincerity. At press time, the company’s twitter account remains locked to the public.
John Boehner forced the largest government spending cuts in United States history, and he’s still treated like a wimp and a sell-out by conservatives. Why? Because it was never about the money.
It was about forcing Obama to lose, about making the black man capitulate, about shoving him into calamitous ruin, and damn the consequences. They presumed that a black man in the White House would mean Armageddon, and when Boehner failed to deliver their apocalypse on time, they got upset.
Clearly the black man couldn’t be keeping his house in order without Boehner laying down for him again and again. Clearly it couldn’t be that Obama’s an effective and skilled administrator. They had been denied satisfaction, they had been denied their schadenfreude, they had been denied the spectacular demise of a republic they felt had betrayed them.
This is what happens when thwarted privilege and inflamed id are given the run of one of the two major parties. The Republican Party doesn’t have principles anymore, it has targets. It has grudges. It has an insatiable bloodlust–yours, theirs, anybody’s. Anything at all, any level of suffering at all, so long as it puts Obama back in his place.
But it won’t end with Obama’s departure from the White House. It’s gone too far. The next Speaker will likely suffer the same fate–surely HILLARY couldn’t avoid an immediate default without Speaker McCarthy’s constant capitulations!
I am sick of this notion on the left, never spoken but often implied, that whomever is most offended is most correct. No. Go fuck yourself. You might be full of shit, and I’m not going to assume you’re right and I’m wrong just because you’re squawking at me. I would hope that you would hold me to the same standard, and dismiss my own bullshit when it shows itself.
Everyone is a messy, complicated person, trying to live in a messy, complicated world, operating on imperfect information and making decisions with a brain that mostly runs on hormones and emotions. We are all–all of us–flawed, limited creatures. We do the best we can, and that’s all we can do, and sometimes we make mistakes, but sometimes that mistake is assuming that we can see other people’s failures perfectly when really we’re only seeing the distorted reflection of our own.
You may think someone did something wrong. And in thinking this, you may yourself be mistaken. That horribly oppressive thing you just saw someone doing might actually be a completely innocuous or even healthy behavior, mediated by a context you were too busy huffing outrage to notice. Have some humility, and be willing to accept that your deeply held moral convictions do not give you magic powers of perception. Before you fire off on someone, consider that you may not have all the information. Consider that their concerns, while not your concerns, might be as valid and important as your own. Consider that nobody has a monopoly on truth. Consider that anger can be righteous, but very often it is not. Consider that love and compassion are almost never a bad choice.
There is a sense in progressive spaces–and this may be true of conservative spaces, I don’t know because I don’t hang out there–that we must all agree on every moral question. Of course nobody raises their hands and says “Yes, I’m the unreasonable asshole who destroys friends and slanders loved ones because we disagree on the appropriateness of using a particular word,” but let’s be honest, we’ve all seen it happen.
And it just so happens that the step which we’re expected to be locked to tends to be the one that promotes a maximal restriction on what is considered acceptable conduct, while somehow simultaneously promoting minimal standards of personal responsibility. If someone throws an absolute tantrum over nothing, we can’t tell people to suck it up and be adults because society is unfair or whatever. We’re not able to ask people to keep some perspective and exercise discretion and emotional self-control because personal responsibility is a neoliberal plot or something.
It simultaneously privileges the individual subjective experience above all else, while demanding a collective effort to curate that experience. This is a contradiction. It cannot function over the long term. And hey, check out what’s happening on social media these days: it’s not functioning!
More and more people are cutting off, backing out. Because it is literally impossible to function in a society where we are all responsible for the emotional experiences of everyone but ourselves.
I’m sick of the self-flagellating notion that if someone asserts that you’ve made some kind of moral error, that you must immediately back off of whatever you were doing, ask for forgiveness, and then adapt your conduct to whatever the accuser demanded of you. And if you don’t, then you are ::crash of thunder:: PROBLEMATIC. This ethos has no room to admit that maybe the person who is claiming offense is doing so for disingenuous reasons. Nor can it admit that maybe someone who is being sincere is nonetheless being unreasonable.
And then the weird, nasty wrinkle that makes all of this even worse is that somehow, once someone is being PROBLEMATIC, you can do whatever you want to them to vent your rage, and it’s perfectly acceptable. You want to violate someone’s privacy? Go ahead, they earned it. You want to spread rumors around that they’re a pedophile? Go ahead, that’s totally cool. I mean, it doesn’t really matter if they actually did something wrong. It only matters that you think that they did! Isn’t that great? I mean, horrifying?
I used to be as earnest a go-getter about this stuff as you can imagine. But now, at the ripe old age of 29, I feel like I’ve been fighting for a thousand years, and losing every step of the way. This corrosive, bitter way of thinking and behaving is killing us. We’ve made so much progress, and we’re in danger of losing it all because of a backlash that we on the social left will trigger with our own strident intransigence. Empathy for the people we disagree with is important. Cutting yourself off from anyone you ever have an unpleasant dealing with isn’t the answer. By all means, curate your online experience however you like, but this unending holy war mentality has got to stop.
If anything gives me me hope, it’s Stein’s Law: ”Things that can’t go on forever, don’t.”
