Current mood:

angry

I'm a very small fish, in the SF world. I don't expect my opinion to mean much. For that reason, I've delayed commenting on the drama that keeps lurching up out of its shallow grave. For that reason, and partly because my non-internet life has been...stressful.

I've seen a few people say things like, "Well, there was bad behavior on all sides, so my position is the morally unassailable refusal to take a position, because I'm so above that." I say--screw that crap. It makes me think of people who say things like, "Well, the left is no better than the right! I mean, there's Michael Moore!" As though one Michael Moore equaled Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh and Michelle Malkin and...

And as if a few bad actors outweighed the rightness of an argument. As if a few lost tempers in comments--I have seen no actual flames in original posts by, say, coffeeandink--was the moral equivalent of institutionalized racism. Or outing someone and exposing them to danger, despite being told what it is you're doing. Or deliberately directing readers to malware instead of the actual evidence of your behavior.

And as if that's not just one more variant of the tone argument. "You're not being nice enough. If you were, then I'd deign to listen to what you're saying." Like the school bully telling you he'll stop slugging you if you ask him politely. Somehow, it always turns out that he won't believe he's really hurting you if you're not yelling. And when you yell, why, he'd listen to your request to not be beaten ever so much more attentively if you were only polite about it.

Folks, racism is wrong. Which these days everyone knows, or at least says. But if you're saying to yourself, "But I'm not racist!" then you are part of the problem. If you are speaking or acting in a racist manner, the purity of your intentions is meaningless. The purity of your intentions becomes malice, when you refuse to acknowledge even the possibility that you've done wrong. Whether you meant to do wrong or not. And when I say "you" I also mean "I." Because I'm a white girl raised in this culture, and I fuck up sometimes.

The current iteration of The Undead has left me disheartened. The astonishingly malicious behavior exhibited by a few professionals in this field is appalling. I find such behavior entirely unacceptable, and am horrified to be even tangentially associated with it.

Sol Invictus, people, a little introspection! A pause to consider the mere possibility of your possibly being in the wrong, here.