serakit

Over on Tumblr the fandom is doing a whole bunch of characterization notes and discussions for GBBO AUs and several people have said that as a result of all the "Tim would be X! Jon and Martin are this flavor of adorable!" on it they're starting writing them and just... this is AMAZING and I WANT THIS THING! I want a MILLION fics of THIS THING! I want this to become a fandom trope, where everyone writes a GBBO AU because that's one of the things you do in this fandom.

It's very... academic.

No, really, *very* academic. Has sentences like "My psychosocial development was inculcated in a white supremacist culture in which I am the superior group" level academic. (The whole book is like that.) I've been steeping in discourse and I frequently had trouble following it. In fact, I was frequently only following it because it's not saying anything other than Racism 101, nothing that a hundred other resources out there don't say in far easier language. Like, it really does seem like she said "Let's take Racism 101 and say it in the most abstruse language possible!" The actual definition of "white fragility" seems to be "that defensiveness white people have when someone brings up race", and people have been talking about that for a long time before Robin DiAngelo came up with a catchy name for it that people can use to hit each other with in their Woker-Than-Thou discussions. Sure, later on in the book she defines it thusly: "White fragility is much more than mere defensiveness or whining. It may be conceptualized as the sociology of dominance: an outcome of white people's socialization into white supremacy and a means to protect, maintain, and reproduce white supremacy." But all of the examples of it that she gives on a *practical* level? Are defensiveness or whining.

It's also not very practical. She spends a lot of time talking about societal constructs and interrogating your feelings and does not present any sort of things you should actually be *doing* once you interrogate your feelings-- and the part where she says that if you're not talking about race with your friends of color they probably don't trust you to handle it *really* needs to have a section about whether and how to address that with them in a way that doesn't end in dramatically going up to them and being like "You know I'm not RACIST, right?" (Yes, near the end there's a little about this, but it's a hundred pages later and in very impractical language.) Towards the end of the book she gets into the practicalities of running an anti-racist workshop, and a lot of the things she says there makes me think the reason she has so many stories of people angrily challenging her is that she's bad at running workshops, specifically in the "acting like the world is as it should be rather than as it is" sense-- yes, people *should* respond to antiracism training in certain ways, but since they don't, you as the trainer need to structure your training to try to account for that.

(Nor does she at any point *define* what an "authentic cross-racial relationship" is, though she does note that they're good and we should have them. I think I've just found yet another context in which I'm wary of the word "authentic.")

Also she spends a *lot* of time being like "White people do things in this way, which is bad. This is how I do things, which is the Correct way to do them." She is, I will note, also a white person, and she does not ever give examples of *other* white people behaving in the Correct way, nor does she give more than one example of herself making a mistake-- and that example is given to show off the very elaborated self-flagellation she does by way of apologizing for it.

I actually don't think I agree with the people who think it exists solely to promote anti-racism corporate training; she spends more than half the book wandering through heavy academia and only starts getting into corporate anti-racism training at the end-- most of the really egregious stuff comes from the last few chapters; while the first several have occasional digressions into WTF they're mostly just "none of this is innovative or new and you could have used SO MANY FEWER words."

While I've yet to read "Waking Up White", I have seen seen its author speak and I suspect it will be much better if you're looking for "white woman talks about coming to terms with your participation in structural racism" books. Or you could go check out one of the many lists of "read these Black authors instead of reading White Fragility" that have been circulating.

(As a tangential aside: I am *deeply distrustful* of the "this will make you uncomfortable, in fact feeling uncomfortable is desirable; that's how you know it's working" discourse that's common in a lot of dismantling-your-privilege work and heavily emphasized here, because while yes, doing it right often will make you uncomfortable, there really needs to be some sort of way of getting across to neophytes, standard when that is brought up, about the difference between "uncomfortable because it's breaking down your stereotypes" and "uncomfortable because someone is using social justice lingo to promote terrible things." I do not want people assimilating the idea that to be enlightened they have to accept all the discomfort from anyone who proclaims it's in the service of the cause; that's how you get cults.)

So according to the internet, the reason for the fireworks being such a thing is because the police are distributing fireworks to people in order to make lot of noise so we won't notice when they start their armed assault on... the protestors? I think? It's vague on that point. We will by that point be so used to the pounding of fireworks that we won't hear and therefore won't notice guns mowing down the protestors by the hundreds.

Also saw one with "If we know and believe the feds and narcs distribute firearms and drugs in the hood, is it really such a leap to fireworks?" Which I suppose it might not be if one believed they were in fact *distributing* either firearms or drugs. (Planting them on people, sure, but they're not running around *distributing* such things. What would be the point? If you want to arrest someone for drugs and you have some drugs you can come up with a pretext to search their car and "find" the drugs, and this is much less risky for you than just... distributing them.)

Now, several news organizations have looked into this and found that there are lots of people buying and reselling on Instagram in the fireworks stores and even gone out and talked to some of the illegal fireworks dealers selling stuff out of the backs of their cars. Gothamist had a story about the ridiculous amount of fireworks before George Floyd was killed and the protests were even started.

(Also, "calling 311 sends you to 911 and 911 sends you to 311" is... the sort of thing that would be REALLY REALLY NOTICEABLE if it were actually happening and definitely marks the person saying it as consciously spreading lies rather than being a paranoid dupe.)

But even without the news organizations debunking this, it's ridiculous. Because the majority of people don't actually react to noises that sound like an aerial assault in the moment; they wait and see what the news told them it was anyway. And the news is all out at the protests, so they would notice and report it if the police started just opening fire.

I didn't actually get into any arguments with anyone about this one; I'm just sort of staring at it like "Y'all do realize this is the sort of thing that leads to no one believing you when the government actually *does* do something that sounds like a conspiracy theory, right?"

(Also, in a bit of hilarity, while looking up news articles about this I came across an online fireworks store that's selling a "conspiracy pack" full of their most elaborate bangs and booms.)

In which the Magnus Archives needs to comply with the GDPR. It's *hilarious*, especially since the new compliance officer has no idea what the Institute actually *is* (and thus assumes Jon's complaints about "I don't have time to meet with you because I got kidnapped a bunch" are jokes). The HR manager *does* know some but not all of what's going on, having worked at the Institute long enough to know what's going on in Artifact Storage, and so she's allowing for the possibility of "Jon can read minds and actually was kidnapped," while still trying to get him to fall into line with normal HR stuff. And it continues with Elias's determination to make his stint trying to destroy the world as bureaucratic as possible. https://archiveofourown.org/works/24257458

(Also be sure to check out "works inspired by this one", in which we see things like how Brexit affected the Institute.)

I've been somewhat skeptical of the Paradox of Tolerance for a while, but today I came across the original quote:

"The so-called paradox of freedom is the argument that freedom in the sense of absence of any constraining control must lead to very great restraint, since it makes the bully free to enslave the meek. The idea is, in a slightly different form, and with very different tendency, clearly expressed in Plato.

Less well known is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. — In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law, and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal.”

(Which I pulled from here: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/25998-the-so-called-paradox-of-freedom-is-the-argument-that-freedom but I've seen the whole thing quoted in a few other places.)

Specifically, note the part in the middle that all the Paradox of Tolerance people generally like to excise, that says that you shouldn't start suppressing them until they start getting violent and stop meeting you on the level of speech.

So as it turns out I've been right to be extremely skeptical of it, because he didn't actually *say* what most of his proponents say he said. Not that I think saying "Maybe you should go read the actual quote" will get me anywhere arguing with the sort of person who buys into it.

Other relevant thing I've discovered recently: the people who think we should have hate speech laws like Europe has should sit down and look at how those laws are actually enforced; The Intercept has an article about how those laws are used to suppress left-wing causes at least as often as they're used to suppress actual hate speech. But again, I expect the response I'll get is "but in America it wouldn't be like that!" Especially when you consider current Library Science Discourse, from people who really should know better, of a vocal group of librarians suggesting the Seattle Public Library should have denied the TERF group the use of their meeting room despite the fact that any lawsuit over doing so being one the library would be certain to lose. This course of action is advocated on the grounds that unjust laws (ie the First Amendment) are to be disobeyed. I've also heard "we fought back against the Patriot Act despite lawsuits; not fighting this is just proving your bigotry!"

We fought the Patriot Act with the aim of getting the courts to strike it down; the courts *can't* strike down the First Amendment. If they lose that lawsuit (which they will), the city loses a lot of money, the TERFs get a lot of money and media attention, and any good the library could have done for marginalized communities is lost. But honestly? The consequences of them *winning* that lawsuit would be worse-- because losing that lawsuit would at least be localized. If the library *wins* that lawsuit... well, "hate group" is not a legally defined term. If they win that lawsuit all the libraries in the South are free to call whatever active political groups they dislike hate groups and deny them use of their meeting rooms. Do you *really* want to open that can of worms? Do you have a strategy for ensuring that wouldn't splash back negatively and cause a whole lot of unintended, undesired consequences? (I have yet to meet a single person espousing this who has an answer to that question that isn't some variation on "by asking that question you're proving that you're part of the problem" or "that's why we need wholesale revolution." Librarians really should know better.)

Tonight's round of terrible takes I found on Twitter (this sort of thing is why I spent most of the day not touching my social media): "Riots are changing things! This is a wake up call for the 'if you don't support Biden how are you going to change things' people!"

And this represents such a fundamental misunderstanding of how any of this works. Because yes, the protests are causing local governments to do things. They may yet cause some *state* governments to do things. Those run on fairly slim margins, and they're close to the ground. They really need to be responsive to their people, when their people are this upset-- and in the case of some of the changes, particularly in Minneapolis, I gather that the politicians have wanted to be making those changes for years and what the protests doing is giving them is cover more than anything.

But the Republicans don't actually care about public opinion at this point, and any protest that's sufficiently violent that it brings down the *federal* government is going to be an actual civil war. They're banking on voter suppression, disinformation, and racism to win again, and to ensure they have another four years to rewrite the government so they can do away with elections altogether and just be dictators. Not voting for Biden still gets another four years of Trump (or, apparently, possibly Tom Cotton, who probably won't be dealing with Russia but is still... the person who wrote that op-ed and also it seems really late in the process to be putting your name forward), and with it the strong possibility that there will be no more elections ever in this country. If anything, I'd say the protests and unrest make it *more* important to vote for Biden, because Biden's not going to send death squads to kill the protestors later and a Biden administration's Justice Department would probably at least consider evidence that local police departments are disappearing protestors. (I have not done actual research into whether that is a thing that's happening. There are a *lot* of people who seem to think that a suspicious number of Ferguson organizers are dead and were probably assassinated by cops and while I haven't done a ton of research into that, that one... might be real, y'all.)

But then, I suspect the people sharing takes like that *want* to completely overturn our governmental system and set up something new, and are ignoring the example set by the French Revolution.

I've been listening to Endless Thread's special five-part Madness series, which is about Ewen Cameron, widely accepted as the author of the most horrific of the MK ULTRA experiments.

Apparently psychic driving is *not* a procedure invented by Hannibal. Apparently it is a real thing that Cameron was actually doing. The podcast takes pains to note in the beginning that things bear resemblance to Brave New World and implies that he was pulling more of his psychological theory from science fiction than actual science. While I can believe that to a point, I've read enough about the early history of psychiatric institutes to know that that didn't make him particularly unusual, even in the fifties and sixties-- he was not doing any of this *that* much later than lobotomies were the highest of psychiatric fashion.

Similarly, while the podcast implies he invented insulin shock therapy, that well predated him and was quite widespread. I can *kinda* see how you get from that to sleep comas as a therapeutic agent, but as with a lot of psychiatry at the time it didn't work. Also he very quickly moved from treating schizophrenia to mind control. Which he was still claiming was therapeutic.

This podcast seems much more shocked by Cameron's behavior than I would be-- while his behavior is undeniably *awful* it's more a matter of degree than kind in terms of abuses going on at the time, and I think it's important to remember that, not to excuse him, but to make it clear that the whole profession was doing some bad stuff. There's a deep trek into the moral vicissitudes of "How does someone who was actually a fairly competent and accomplished psychiatrist in many respects wind up doing this awful stuff to people and keep doing it even when it's clearly not helping them" that I think bears some comparison to the "Stop using 'inhuman monster' to describe rapists" movement: ordinary people are capable of great diversity within themselves which includes being quite capable of monstrous acts, and it has more to do with a strong sense of your own importance coupled with never coming up against anyone willing to set boundaries or enforce consequences than it does with some innate sort of monstrousness.

But the very fact that I don't find it shocking in the context of what I already know about psychiatric practice at the time that wasn't an experiment makes me wonder just how much cross-pollination and bleedthrough there was-- Cameron, after all, was presenting at least some of his results at psychiatric conferences, and I can only assume others were as well, especially since most of them didn't know they were being funded by the CIA. Given the sheer scale of it, it wouldn't be surprising if that affected psychiatric practice more generally. The reverse could also be true, since Cameron got recruited on the strength of experiments he was already doing on things that hadn't occurred to the CIA on their own, that they saw him presenting at conferences--and this explicitly calls out Cameron as the author of some of the most awful MK ULTRA things. Hospital personnel telling the journalist that broke it that they were afraid of Cameron but didn't approve reminds me of the lobotomy craze; there were plenty of people who disapproved of that but weren't willing to risk professional opprobium from people who were at the top of the field.

(So I realized that part of the problem I was having with "consuming engaging and thought-provoking media" was having no one to discuss it with afterwards. So guess what y'all get to read about now!)

Anonymous is back: https://twitter.com/ASB_Breaking/status/1266939977709084672

As far as I can tell, though, it's mostly just a dramatic video; I see no evidence they've actually *done* very much. And we all know that "genuine" isn't really something you can apply to Anonymous. They have no organizational structure; just a bunch of people in IRC channels some of whom get together and do stuff. It really is just a name and an imagery that people can pick up and put down as they choose. It carries some weight because of past things that have happened under its umbrella, but at its core it's true anarchism.

This is *evidenced* by the fact that so far they've... DDoSed the Minneapolis police department. CloudFlare's protection is already kicking in there; it loaded extremely slowly when I tried it, and I saw the CloudFlare protection screen, but it is up and I was able to access it-- and not just the CloudFlare snapshot; a second try ten minutes later got me the actual page and no more slowness. Besides which, DDoSing something shows you can get access to a botnet, which I gather isn't hard if you're the sort of person who knows how to visit darknet sites. It's not a terribly impressive feat of hacktivism. Certainly it doesn't merit the kind of drama and "YAY ANONYMOUS" that's starting to be all over Twitter, and it's definitely not the kind of "We will expose all your secrets" promised by that video.

Though I do agree with the people on Twitter going "Good job on accessibility for including captions."

Wizards of the Coast *is* slowly pricing everyone out of the game. When you have the same major kerfuffle over and over again, either you're doing it on purpose and you don't care, or that highly vaunted market research you're always so proud of needs a major tweak. Since I don't think the people running Wizards and specifically Magic are *actually* this unobservant, that leaves door number one.( Cut for being really long... )