Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
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User ID: 297
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
2yr ago
Thanks to @TheBookOfAllan, I decided maybe Twitter slapfights about fantasy authors might not be Too Online to talk about here. I mean, let's face it, the nerd quotient here is pretty damn high. On the rare occasions I write a top-level post, it's usually about the intersection of Culture War squabbles and hobby drama. So -
First They Came for the Fantasy Authors
Brandon Sanderson, in case you don't recognize the name, is a best-selling fantasy author. In impact on the genre today, he's probably second only to George R. R. Martin. He famously finished Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series, and he churns out new books at a rate that makes Stephen King look lazy.
(I have read quite a few of his books, and find them reliably entertaining, but Sanderson is a mediocre writer whose schtick is rigorously-defined magic systems and world-building, to the point that his books sometimes read like LitRPGs, and a big overarching cosmology called the "Cosmere" that unites every one of his series into his own personal MCU.)
Sanderson is also a Mormon. If you've noticed we're in the Culture War thread, you might have an inkling where this is going.
From time to time over the years, some LGBT folks have taken a run at Sanderson over his religion. In 2007 or so, he wrote a blog post offering a sort of milquetoast apologetic, basically saying he was totally cool with The Gays but he also believed in the divine revelations of his church so gay marriage is still a no-go, mmkay? He's been under continual pressure by fans to "update" his views, and he kind of has, saying he continues to "learn and grow." He's tossed a few gay and trans characters into his stories, and he's even written a FAQ: How Do You Feel About Gay Characters?. However, he remains a practicing Mormon, continues to tithe to the LDS, and has very carefully never actually walked back the belief that homosexuality is a sin.
So how has he avoided getting the Orson Scott Card/JK Rowling treatment? Well, for one thing, Sanderson is a genuinely nice guy who is affable with everyone, loves his fans, is very encouraging of new authors, and most importantly, generally avoids any kind of culture war and does not get into Twitter fights. He's got legions of defenders, and most of them accept his bland statements of tolerance and acceptance. It's pretty obvious that he does not personally dislike gay people, and I'm sure he would be thrilled if the LDS elders announced tomorrow that they just received a new revelation from God that He's totally cool with The Gays.
For most people, this is sufficient. There are people who are zealous and dogmatic about everything their church teaches, and there are those who clearly struggle sometimes with a religious doctrine that conflicts with their personal feelings. Most people recognize that everyone wrestles with cognitive dissonance, think "live and let live" is good enough, and if they like Brandon Sanderson despite disagreeing with his religious beliefs, they'll recite "no ethical consumption under capitalism" or "how to be a fan of problematic things."
Most people, but not Gretchen Felker-Martin.
Gretchen Felker-Martin is a transwoman with a single published book: Manhunt. If you wanted to create a hostile caricature of an unpleasant leftist conflict theorist who checks every stereotype, you'd have a hard time finding a better archetype. Think trans Arthur Chu with a foothold in SFF.
Manhunt is about (caveat - I haven't read it, this is what I gathered from reviews) a plague that turns all cis men into feral zombies, and in the post-apocalypse, brave stunning transfolx battle for survival against cismen and TERF hordes. (Yes, seriously.) They also harvest testicles for hormones or something, there's a ton of graphic rape and murder, and also apparently there's a throw-away line about JK Rowling being burned alive in her mansion.
Manhunt was published by Tor, which also, incidentally, publishes Brandon Sanderson.
So, a few days ago, Felker-Martin posted this tweet. (ETA: Hilariously, Twitter's new "added context by readers" feature is now defending Sanderson. I wonder how enraging that is to Felker-Martin?)
In itself, this would be hardly a skirmish in the Culture War. Trans woman doesn't like a Mormon author, wants to cancel him, writes stupid Tweet. It looks an obvious move to try to kneecap a rival, but Felker-Martin probably bit off too much to chew this time and has mostly been mocked for presuming to have some sort of gatekeeping role in deciding who SFF will "tolerate."
But - the reason I wrote this is because I've seen the Sanderson criticism take off a little bit, more than in previous attempts. His haters are really trying to give it legs. The Midnight Society, for example, is a woke satirist who is actually, pretty funny most of the time with really on-point skewerings of SFF and horror authors (except when taking obligatory swipes at JK Rowling by portraying her as a slithering snake hissing about Jewssss and transsss), and this tweet started out great (a completely deserved send-up of Sanderson's tropes) before shifting to an unsubtle signal-boost of the discourse started by Felker-Martin.
Twitter and Reddit seem to have an awful lot of "Hey, did you know Brandon Sanderson is a Mormon?" threads. (It is amazing to me that there are people who've been reading his books for years and had no idea - he does not make it a secret, and also I guessed by the end of the first Mistborn trilogy that the author was a Mormon without knowing anything about him.)
You can see all the usual arguments being recycled: "Should we cancel all Mormon/Catholic/Christian authors then?" (Felker-Martin: "Unironically, yes.") "It's just his personal belief, has nothing to do with how he treats gay people." ("But he TITHES and that means he is funding the LDS's Anti-Gay Death Camps!")
So woke fandom tried to take a scalp and overreached (this time), because while Tor is pretty darn woke, they're still not going to drop one of their biggest cash cows. Yet.
Can You Cancel a Bestseller?
Not literally, no. But can you hurt even a big name? Yes.
JK Rowling is still mega-rich, still a best-selling author, still beloved in most of the world. Yet I'm sure it does sting, even if she never says so publicly, that she and her books will never be celebrated again without an asterisk, that Harry Potter fandom tries to put her name in small print if at all, that she will never be reunited with the stars who she saw grow up and considered friends, until they were forced to denounce her. (Though in Emma Watson's case, it doesn't seem like much forcing was needed.)
They might not be able to Voldemort Brandon Sanderson, but being turned into a homophobic villain who is reviled by fandom and no longer invited to conventions would definitely hurt him. More cynically, Felker-Martin might know that Sanderson was too big a target, but that much smaller Mormon (and Catholic and Baptist, etc.) authors might be intimidated.
(Which makes me tempted to say, "Okay, now do Muslims," but there are only a handful of Muslim SFF authors I know of. The most famous is probably Gwendolyn Willow Wilson, an American Karen who converted to Islam and writes the Ms. Marvel comic book series. Saladin Ahmed wrote a few fantasy novels and also the Miles Morales Spider Man. Amal El-Mohtar is very in with the woke Hugos crowd. All of them apparently believe that Mohammad was totally cool with The Gays. It will be interesting to see if an actual tradcon Muslim ever tries to break into the industry.)
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
2yr ago
Update on the Black Teens Versus Pregnant Nurse story.
This twitter thread seems like a reasonable summary. I know it's not entirely unbiased, but absent additional contradictory evidence, the story seems to basically check out like this:
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Kids had checked out the ebikes for a ride, and docked them before the 45-minute "free" period ended, planning to undock them to resume riding. (This is apparently a pretty common practice?)
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They're sitting on the bikes chilling, when Comrie, the pregnant nurse, approaches and asks to have one of the bikes.
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The teens say no, unmoved by her appeals for consideration for her pregnancy.
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She scans (checks out) a bike one of the kids is sitting on, and tries to take it.
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The kerfluffle we saw on video ensues. The kids apparently filmed it with a legitimate fear that she would turn it into "gang of teens harasses pregnant white lady."
So basically, no one looks like an entirely innocent victim here. The kids were just hanging out in preparation to check out the bikes again, but since they were docked, you don't really get to "call dibs" on a bike you are not currently renting. Technically Comrie was entitled to take an available bike; the kids shouldn't have been squatting on them. They were also kind of jerks for not showing a little compassion for an obviously pregnant woman (their version is that if they'd given up the bike, one of them would have had to find some other way to get back to the Bronx).
That said, deciding "Screw you, I'm taking your bike anyway, get off" wasn't great behavior on her part, even if legally justified. I cut her more slack because apparently she just got off a 12-hour shift, and she was pregnant.
However, even if the teens were perhaps being inconsiderate and less than gentlemanly, the narrative that's basically portrayed them as ganging up on her and trying to steal her bike appears to be inaccurate.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
2yr ago
Becoming Radicalized by the Hugos
A Very Culture Warrish Review of A Half-Built Garden, by Ruthanna Emrys
In which my fellow nerds will recognize the battlefield and everyone else will roll their eyes and not know who the fuck these people are.
Wordy Pretentious Preamble About My Reading Habits
Everyone remembers the Sad Puppies affair (and the sequel, the Rabids), right? It's been covered here (well, at the old place) before. At the time, I admit to some schadenfreude at the wailing and gnashing of teeth, but I thought Vox Day and Larry Correia were making entirely too much of the fact that phallic rocketship stories don't win Hugos anymore. I actually read some of Vox Day's "Hugo Nominated" fiction. He is… not a good writer. I enjoy Larry Correia, but it's bubblegum bang-bang shoot'em up wish fulfillment, which is all well and good, but the same caliber as Ian Fleming's writing – entertaining and marketable and would make for great movies, but not really, well, whatever the Hugos used to represent. Ditto Brad Torgerson; serviceable prose, but fanzine-level execution.
As for the three Johns (Kratman, Ringo, and Wright), I've read all of them, and Kratman and Ringo tell rippin' good yarns with execrable prose and plotting. Only John C. Wright is actually a really good writer (though he does get a bit up his own ass, especially since his conversion to Catholicism).
I'm just saying, if the right wants to reclaim any creative spaces, they need to find better creatives.
Conversely, I used to really like John Scalzi. I watched Vox Day beat him like a pinata online, and though I hadn't gone full anti-SJW yet, I started to think…. "VD is right." His cruel but accurate takedowns were intensely petty, spiteful, and personal, and yet he had the squishy little man pegged.
Scalzi has since become ever more pretentious, ever more virtue signaling, ever more… well, VD would say "effeminate," I'd just say I started to recognize the sight of someone rolling over to show his belly, someone desperate to stay in the good graces of a clique where being a straight white male who cites Heinlein as an inspiration means he's always one bad Tweet away from being consigned to the outer darkness. My fondness for his books curdled, as I started to see his smarmy potato face in all his characters.
As went Scalzi, so went the Hugos, where for the past few years it seems like there's a little bit of straight white guy affirmative action so that John Scalzi and Clarkesworld can stay relevant, but basically it's a women's fiction award now, and if there's ever a white dude-dominated slate again (yet alone a white dude-dominated winners' list), Worldcon will burn.
And ya know, I don't hate women's fiction, or women in SF. I really am an omnivorous reader. But over time, some things have become hard not to notice. Like the fact that N.K. Jemisin is a fanfic-level hack who's fawned over and feted and cooed adoringly as the next Octavia Butler (she's not). Like how Kameron Hurley and Seanan McGuire and Ann Leckie are all decent writers but such insufferably hateful harpies that, like Scalzi, I can't stand to read them anymore.
Vox Day and the alt-right say "Don't give money to people who hate you," but I am not alt-right and have remained determinedly apolitical in my media consumption. But gods help me I'm becoming one of those guys who side-eyes anything written post Great-Awokening by a chick.
Which brings me to…
A Half-Built Garden, by Ruthanna Emrys
A literary descendent of Ursula K. Le Guin, Ruthanna Emrys crafts a novel of extra-terrestrial diplomacy and urgent climate repair bursting with quiet, tenuous hope and an underlying warmth. A Half-Built Garden depicts a world worth building towards, a humanity worth saving from itself, and an alien community worth entering with open arms. It's not the easiest future to build, but it's one that just might be in reach.
I know, I know, I should have paid more attention to that blurb.
I picked this up because it's a First Contact story that got batted around as some new hotness in SF, and I like alien stories with a modern perspective that are more original than "How will we repel the invaders?"
(I like alien invasion and other MilSF stories too, but like I said, I am an omnivorous reader.)
A Half-Built Garden is very likely going to wind up on the Hugo shortlist this year, and probably has a decent chance of winning. It's a well-written, creative story that brings some interesting ideas to the table, it's innovative science fiction…
.. and it's also a meandering, actionless piece of women's fiction dwelling on pronouns, interstellar consent culture, lactating breasts, and internal monologues that all but drowned me in estrogen.
I've seen this book compared to Becky Chambers. I haven't read any of Becky Chambers's books, but they sound exactly like the kind of story I am not interested in (people go to space, have problems which they solve by talking them out in a civilized fashion, the end?).
A Half-Built Garden is "Aliens arrive, people have problems which they solve by talking them out in a civilized fashion, the end."
(1/3)
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
2yr ago
(2/3)
The Bitter Review I Would Not Post on Amazon
The year is 2083. Earth's climate has suffered and we're not out of the woods yet, but the world is finally getting its shit together enough to undo some of the damage.
There are basically three factions in the late 21st century:
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Environmental Cooperatives, sort of NGOs on steroids who have vaguely-defined authority over most environmental concerns and are doing the actual work of repairing the environment. How exactly they obtained their authority is never really explained, but presumably it's something like "Everyone finally realized we're all going to die if we don't listen to the environmentalists." Okay. They have lots of virtual meetings and talk about species and ecology preservation, carbon emissions, virus containment, and weather forecasting. They invented this whole new kind of networking called the "dandelion networks" which are kind of like Twitter except very peaceful and everyone reaches a consensus and they are resilient against disinformation and wrongthink.
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Governments. The old nation-states (including the USA) are still around, creaky old dinosaurs who are kind of obsolete except they still have armies and nukes so you can't exactly ignore them. When the aliens arrive, NASA is ecstatic to become relevant again.
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Corporations. When the environmental cooperatives effectively took over the world (it's never put this way, but it seems like basically they run everything and the governments with… armies and nukes just… let them) the corporations had the choice of getting with the program or fucking off to their own micronations. They decided to fuck off to literal and/or figurative islands. So the remnants of late-stage capitalism now exist in little "aisland" enclaves of their own where everyone plays status-seeking corporate reindeer games while trying to stay relevant by offering goods and services to the environmental cooperatives and governments. They aren't literally given black hats but the author's voice heavily implies they are bad guys who want to go back to the bad old days of despoiling the Earth. (Spoiler: They are the bad guys and they want to go back to the bad old days of despoiling the Earth.)
Aliens Arrive!
They land on the Maryland shore, just outside of Washington, D.C., and are stumbled upon by our first person POV protagonist Judy Wallach-Stevens, a Jewish lesbian who lives in a large manor house with her polycule, including her wife and their infant daughter, a they/them, and a transman (who have a they/them toddler of their own whose gender is pointedly never specified). Judy does ecology stuff for the Chesapeake Bay Watershed Network, but mostly she cooks. She seems like a really interesting and original char-
About the Author:
Ruthanna Emrys is the author of the Innsmouth Legacy series, including Winter Tide and Deep Roots, and the Imperfect Commentaries collection. She writes radically hopeful short stories about religion and aliens and psycholinguistics. She lives in a mysterious manor house on the outskirts of Washington, DC with her wife and their large, strange family. She creates real versions of imaginary foods in her crowded kitchen, gives unsolicited advice, and occasionally attempts to save the world.
… okay, well, Larry Correia writes himself as his MC too, so anyway.
Judy and her wife happen to be carrying their infant daughter while out for a stroll, and this turns out to be significant, as the aliens are matriarchal and bringing your children to diplomatic negotiations is a sign of good faith. So by sheer coincidence, while baby and hir two mommies are staring at the spaceship that landed on their front lawn, they have initiated peaceful contact with their visitors, who respond in kind by sending out one of their own with her children.
Or Hor or Its or Zis… this book was full of neopronouns, though actually the humans were more varied than the aliens.
The "Ringers" are actually two species, who made contact with each other ages ago. Since then, they have searched the galaxy for other intelligent races, and found mostly dead worlds where civilizations once existed. It turns out that most races fall into an industrial death spiral: their technological advancement outpaces their ability to manage their environment, and they all wind up making themselves extinct. The Ringers avoided this by going into space, treating their homeworlds as mere raw materials, and have thus concluded that intelligent species are not meant to be planet-bound. When they picked up radio signals from Earth, they sent an expedition to save us.
This is the central "conflict" of the story: the Ringers believe that humanity has to leave Earth or die. Judy and her eco-coops insist they're actually fixing their world (yes, the whole book is literally a Tikkun Olam meme), but the Ringers claim that Earth is already doomed.
I put "conflict" in scare quotes because it's implied that the Ringers might try to force humans to leave Earth. Except.. other than a few tense conversations where Judy says "What if we don't want to?" and the Ringers say "But you have to!" there's never really any kind of threat. The Ringers sent a diplomatic mission, not a warship, and while there's some talk of nanotechnology and how the Ringers could conceivably start disassembling Earth right out from under us (they are apparently advanced enough to have started building a Dyson sphere back home), there's never any indication that this was actually something they had in mind. They just sort of assumed they'd explain the situation to us in a reasonable manner, and humanity would agree that their solution makes sense.
So all that is interesting enough as a setup. The rest of the book is mostly about the nation-states and the corps and the coops all jockeying to influence the aliens, while the aliens are playing politics in return. Eventually Judy and her wife and child and some corp reps go to the alien home system, there is a bit of nefariousness, but nothing that can't be solved with impassioned speeches inspired by Star Trek (literally).
And that's pretty much it. There is a lot of talking and soapboxing. Every conflict is solved by talking and being more empathetic.
The first is when Judy is invited to visit one of the corporate "aislands" with her new alien friends (who insist on Judy coming along because having made the proper initial diplomatic overtures, they consider her to be Earth's spokeswoman, more or less), and she brings along a weapon that will DDoS the corporate networks. See, the coops' computer network was almost taken down by a virus, which they are pretty sure was caused by the corporations, so Judy's activist parents from a radical Jewish commune cook up a poorly thought-out plan to stick it to the corps. But the whole time Judy is carrying the device around in her pocket she's feeling really bad about using it and feeling sorry for all these capitalist planet-rapers who are, after all, still people just like her. Then one of the capitalist planet-rapers detects the device in her pocket and they talk it out and Judy hands over the device. Then they go to a party and eat lots of food and Judy and the aliens go back to Maryland.
Later, there is another conflict where some of the coop folks want to sabotage the aliens' communications gear. There is some scuffling – someone actually uses a judo throw on someone! Judy lectures everyone about what an immature species we're being. They talk it out.
Finally, they go to the aliens' home system, and the aliens and humans argue a lot, and then the humans demand that they not be "colonized," and the aliens recognize their demand for affirmative consent. They talk it out. The end.
Sigh.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
2yr ago
(3/3)
DEI…. in Spaaaace!
You've already picked up all of the major Culture War points, but I cannot emphasize just how very, very much a product of a bonafide card-carrying SJW this book is.
Pretty much everyone is queer and/or genderfluid and/or female, except (you guessed it) the unambiguously villainous corporate types (the ambiguously amoral corporate types are genderqueer, and the sympathetic ones are female) and a few government drones. Oh yeah, and the aliens. The male aliens get to be likeable, because the females are in charge.
There are multiple conversations about pronouns and nametags. A minor plot point is that the aliens are matriarchal and so it matters to them who actually gives birth, and Judy's transman housemate is really upset that she didn't put her foot down when the aliens were asking hurtful questions. We also learn that her transman housemate was (of course) abused and almost driven to suicide by bigoted parents who live in one of those conservative enclaves where people are still technophobic, transphobic, and religious.
The wrong kind of religious, I mean. We get multiple digressions about Judy's Jewishness. Growing up in an ultra-leftist Jewish commune, one of the defining moments of her childhood is that some asshole kids drew swastikas on her schoolbooks. In the 2060s. At the corporate-hosted reception for the aliens, she stands around angsting about whether the food (made out of corp-paste or something) contains shrimp or pork. And there's a long talk with the other human mommy in the book (I'll get to that) about the Holocaust. See, the governments and corps put on a display to summarize Earth's history for the aliens, and Judy is very upset that they didn't mention the Holocaust. Like, very upset, in tears.
I don't care about a lot of the woke shit and the neopronouns. I mean, realistically, transpeople are not going away. A writer who writes a story set in 2083 that isn't post-apocalyptic might try to wave away genderspecials as a fad that died out in the 30s, I guess, but otherwise, sure, they are probably a part of the landscape for the foreseeable future, whether you like it or not.
The character is Jewish and Jewish identity (and anti-Semitism) is still Very Important in 2083 - okay, I'll buy it. Our resident Joo-posters I'm sure will have much fun with this, but I mostly shrugged it off, other than, ahem, noticing it. Yes, I did also notice that no one else gets to be religious and not a backwards technophobic asshole. (The aliens have some sort of "spiritual but not religious" thing going on and they even have what I suppose is supposed to be a touching scene with Judy and her transman housemate. The alien wants to do a ritual, Judy can't because she's afraid it might violate her own religion, so the transman, after carefully questioning the alien about what exactly their beliefs entail, overcomes his childhood religious trauma to participate.)
There's also a sex scene. With an alien. Judy (the lesbian) falls in love with one of the male aliens. He's such a good talker and such a good listener, you see. So she discusses it with her wife and they agree to invite the alien into their polycule. This is before they've decided whether to actually have sex with the other humans in their household. But they have a very serious relationship talk with the alien in which they say hey, we kind of like you, and he says well, I kind of like you too, and then they have a threesome.
So human dick is out of the question, but two lesbians are totally DTF with a headless alien spider-thing who is male enough to make hentai jokes.
Even that didn't really squick me much, though. (Larry Niven was writing about alien sex in the 70s.) What did squick me? What made me want to DNF it? (I did finish it.) The many, many, many fucking mommy moments. Yes, I get it, the author is trying to make mothers important characters, not like groty old white dude engineers. Lactating women (and aliens) will save the world.
Judy and her wife literally change a diaper at the moment of first contact. We are constantly treated to descriptions of Judy nursing, how her breasts are feeling, taking nursing pads out of her gear, checking medications for nursing safety, hey, did I mention yet that the main character is a nursing mother nursing throughout the book? (So is the alien girlboss in charge of their expedition.)
One of the other characters, who is so brilliant and important that she's called back from leave to help talk to the aliens, is a NASA engineer who's also a nursing mother. She and Judy talk to each other about aliens and the sociological ramifications of Star Trek captains (yes, seriously) as they "gently sway in sync" while nursing their babies.
Like, hitting on this once or twice would have been an interesting non-traditional perspective. Hitting it as often as Emrys does, I started expecting the book to lactate.
If a man wrote this, we could probably call it a fetish.
The greatest sin of A Half-Built Garden as science fiction is that it turns the entire saga of mankind's (hah, see what I did there?) first contact with aliens into a bunch of table talks about boundaries and consent. And I mean this literally, in every sense – one of the big table talks is on Earth, where the aliens come to Judy's Seder gathering. There's another on a corporate "aisland" (the one where Judy is worried about whether corp-food is kosher.) The last one is in the Ringers' home system, where besides asserting their right to self-determination, the humans lecture the aliens about their wrongbad gender essentialism and explain that humans aren't actually sexually dimorphic and give a speech about gender fluidity that could have come straight out of a LGBTQ+ DEI session. At the end of this speech, one of the aliens comes out as nonbinary (no, I am not making this up), and then we get the big reveal that Judy's wife is, in fact, a transwoman.
Congratulations Earthlings, you've spread ROGD to the stars!
For all my snark and bitterness, the real crime here is that Emrys is not a bad writer. The aliens are genuinely interesting (and alien), the situation that she sets up is plausible and has plenty of potential for actual conflict (which does not have to be armed), and I have to admit that her prose was above my usual expectations for SF&F. A less hyper-woke writer could have written a pretty good book. Instead, she wrote a Hugo-worthy one.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
2yr ago
I feel some sympathy for OP that he's so clueless and has had so little experience or advice that he thought "Hi, we've had some positive interactions in class so... wanna fuck?" would be an acceptable approach.
But my sympathy is limited - unless he's literally impaired (i.e., autism spectrum, and even then, most folks on the spectrum are able to learn some baseline rules, particularly when it comes to asking people for sex), this was just unbelievably stupid.
I've seen a number of posters suggest that he was done in by bad/disingenuous feminist dating advice, implying that women will tell men "Yes, we like to fuck just as much as you do!" and that means you can approach a woman for sex the same way you wish a woman would approach you for sex. But I don't recall ever seeing dating advice, even from feminists, suggesting that any woman wants a proposition like "How about being my no-strings-attached fuck buddy?" That's a relationship that usually develops from mutual attraction and having hung out together enough that clearly there are some sparks, but neither one (claims) to want a "relationship."
(Do I think "FWB" is generally a stable kind of relationship? No, and I believe that very few women really want to be someone's FWB, it's something they settle for while trying to secure a real commitment.)
So this poor guy wasn't ill-intentioned, but he made an absolutely horrible social blunder, one that anyone, man or woman, could have told him was a blunder, and unfortunately he's suffering the effects people usually do when committing a massive faux pas. It sounds like the consequences for him are that she's told all her friends (and realistically, would you expect her not to?) and he's probably sunk what dating prospects he had at that school. This is sad, but unless this becomes a story of him being charged with actual sexual harassment and academically punished (which I'll grant is certainly within the realm of possibility), I don't think he's suffering more than you'd expect. He fucked up, and fucking up has consequences.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
11mo ago
Ugh. /r/boardgames (and boardgamegeek, the largest dedicated hobby site for boardgaming), and the boardgaming hobby in general, are emblematic of my growing disgust with leftist politics. boardgamegeek hasn't quite gone as far as RPGnet (which famously explicitly banned any support for Trump on its discussion forums), but they have moderators who openly declare that their "political" forum is a leftist space. Anything right of AOC has to be expressed in the most tepid terms, and expect to get dogpiled with impunity, while any degree of heat in response will get you banned. Boardgamers are the fucking worst. (I can say this, I'm a boardgamer. Although I'm a dirty hex-and-counter wargamer, and only old white supremacist men play those.)
Anyway, a watermelon has been a Palestinian symbol for a while now, and I'm actually a little surprised that Matteo got this much heat for a relatively innocuous pin, especially given that Israel/Palestine remains a kind of third rail in boardgaming, as in most other liberal spaces, because of the intersection of leftist Palestine supporters and Jewish gamers. It suppose it is because the award is German and Germans are extra-sensitive to anti-semitism complaints.
I am willing to extend someone enough charity to accept that "Pro-Palestine" does not necessarily mean "Anti-Israel" (in the sense of "wants Israel destroyed'), let alone "anti-Semitic." Pro-Palestine right now is basically the BLM movement of 23-24. A lot of leftists' support really doesn't go any deeper than "Israelis are bombing children, this is very sad." That said, you often don't have to peel back a pro-Palestine activist's views very deeply to find a seething hatred of Israel, and possibly of Jews.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
1yr ago
I'm a little bit surprised that Ilhan Omar came to Marbach's defense.
Optimistically, I'd like to think she actually believes that stuff about freedom of religion.
Cynically, I suspect she is just anticipating a fight over what her religion believes about LGBT folks.
Even more cynically, I wonder if she just saw an opportunity to slag a Republican Jew.
But I am often surprised that people are surprised that yes, orthodox Christians do in fact believe you (yes, you) are going to go to hell if you do not accept Jesus Christ. Yes, that means they literally believe every last atheist and Muslim and Jew and pagan and Hindu and Buddhist is going to burn in hell forever. (And a lot of the Protestant denominations include Catholics, Mormons, and JWs in that bucket.)
It's almost as amusing as watching liberals in Virginia discover recently that mainstream Muslims are mostly not, in fact, "queer-friendly."
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
2yr ago
I wish we could all just agree that sex is biological and gender is a social role. So if someone wants to say "Some days I feel masc, but other days I'm more femme," okay, whatever Demi Lovato. I'm even willing to use whatever pronouns you prefer, even if that means changing them from time to time (so long as you let me know what they are today and aren't going to throw a tantrum if I sometimes make a mistake). If attention-seeking teens want to claim they are Ψ-gendered today, you can accommodate them if you wish without agreeing that their physical bodies are in some Ψ state that is neither male nor female.
The real problem is not with teenagers who are trying to carve out special, quirky new identities for themselves, it's with the grown-ass adults who take this shit seriously and then run conflict theory on it.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
1yr ago
Sometimes I think you just read posts, decide who's expressing the "conservative" (bad) position, and reflexively argue the opposite.
Whereas people like Rowling aren't fully committed to that broader conservative project, they just want to slander and eradicate trans people
All right, you have hit one of my pet peeves, because I hear this shit all the time from my nice progressive friends. It's just repeated ad infinitum, as an article of faith, as a proven, established fac, that JK Rowling "hates trans people," that she "wants to slander and eradicate them," etc. In unrelated hobby spaces, I've seen it argued unironically, in all seriousness, that she literally advocates "genocide of trans people" (and also that Harry Potter goblins were intended to be metaphors for Jews because she also hates Jews).
I have been a Rowling fan since before she got on Twitter. Yes, I actually like the Harry Potter books (despite being way too old for them). I've read all her Cormoran Strike novels, and even The Casual Vacancy. I follow her on Twitter and I read her blog. So I know whereof I speak, though I won't claim I can remember every single thing she's ever said in public.
I have never seen her say anything that approaches "hate" or "wanting to eradicate" trans people. She has said the opposite many times. She is a standard issue very liberal second wave feminist.
What does she say?
- She does not believe trans women are women.
- Therefore she does not believe trans women should play in women's sports or go to women's prisons.
- She believes trans people should be free to live their lives in peace without harassment.
- Some so-called trans women (like the sexual predators she highlighted) are bad faith opportunists claiming trans status for political purposes or because they would prefer to go to women's prison rather than men's prison.
I think all of these points are reasonable, and even if you disagree with some or all of them, none of them resemble anything like "hate" or wishing for a "trans genocide."
I would love it if you could point to me any public statement of hers, or even a reliable second-hand account of some alleged private statement, in which she's said anything that resembles what you are claiming.
@FCfromSSC already warned you downthread, but you're still filling up the mod queue with reports on your posts, so consider this me underlining what FC said and highlighting a few more things.
Your username is suggestive and seems calculated to provoke, but that's fine - if someone was genuinely a member of the "antifa" movement or sympathetic to them, they would be as welcome to post here as anyone else (and it would be interesting to have their perspective). I don't know if you are sincere or trolling, but either way, you need to understand a couple of things: first, you're going to encounter a lot of hostility. We (mods) factor that in, so when you're being reported just for posting leftist opinions, we aren't generally swayed by that. However, you are following into an unfortunately familiar pattern that many hardcore lefties do when "arriving" here. (I put "arriving" in quotes because you created this account today, and you're clearly not new here, and I have a pretty good suspicion about who you are.) And that is being preemptively rude, condescending, and belligerent, with an attitude of "I am here to set you fascists straight."
Not only is that not going to be received well (or generate any decent discussion), it's against the rules requiring everyone to interact with charity and good faith. No matter how much you don't want to because you think of yourself as doing battle against the forces of evil fascism wokeism Jews the mods.
this is fascism
... duh.
you're afraid, aren't you? you're afraid that you missed the fascism
so your correction is that because some leftists were total psychopaths that makes it better that you failed to notice the fascism and were rude to leftists? wow
This is all condescending, belligerent, and just reads as bad faith.
I see no reason to let you continue to participate with a newly rolled alt if you are going to do so in bad faith. So if you continue in this manner, I'm going to move to go straight to permaban rather than letting you progress through the usual tedious cycle of increasingly longer bans just so you can come back every few weeks to play again.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
9mo ago
One of my guilty pleasures is trash TV, including My 600 Pound Life.
Your observations are generally true for the people on that show. But I think you're being rather uncharitable.
First of all, the patients on that show are extraordinarily obese and unhealthy. They are not your "usual" fat person, but people who've literally reached the point of "lose weight or die." They are also, of course, selected for dramatic and disagreeable personalities who will make for good TV. (You can even see viewers complaining when the season is "too boring" because the patients are cooperative and not dramatic enough.)
You also neglected to mention that most of them are suffering from severe mental illness. The food addiction that has rendered them nearly immobile is clearly a mental illness in itself, but most of them have all kinds of other problems. Most of them are impoverished and come from abusive backgrounds. Childhood sexual abuse is a very common theme. You say they are stupid, entitled, and ignorant; there's a reason you don't see many of them who come from stable and supportive middle class families. Most of the time, when we see family members, they are as fucked up as the patient, if not as fat.
And it's a reality TV show! You know that shit is heavily edited, right? My 600 Pound Life, like most such shows, has been accused of staging confrontations, feeding the "participants" their lines, crafting "storylines" to make them more dramatic, and so on. The patients may be real and their issues are too, but I would not trust the show to be giving you a really accurate picture.
Now, more generally I agree that fat people (even "normal" fat people) have a strong tendency to be in denial about how much they eat and how little exercise they do, or about the health effects of obesity. But it should be obvious that making broad generalizations based on the personalities who appear on a reality TV show is just taking cheap swings at easy targets.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
2yr ago
The Joo-posters are constantly arguing that Jews are essentially a malignant invasive species working for the benefit of their in-group (Jews) to the detriment of non-Jews, and that undermining Western civilization and trying to destroy white society is something they are naturally driven to do. In olden times, they would have just said this is because Jews are inherently wicked because God hates them. Nowadays, that doesn't sound very persuasive, especially to rationalists, so instead they make up HBD theories for why Jews are a uniquely pernicious tribe following biological imperatives.
I know this because it's not exactly a new argument, and you know this because you've been around long enough to have seen it yourself. Why are you pretending that HBD has only ever been about IQ? Even the people whose HBD arguments are primarily focused on blacks are quite open about their belief that HBD says blacks aren't just low IQ, but also impulsive, violent, criminally inclined, etc.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
2mo ago
AI DESTROYS THE HUGOS!!!
Okay, that's totally a clickbait title and not really accurate. But hey, it's not as high stakes as a potential nuclear conflict between India and Pakistan, or Trump's tariffs, or even whether or not polyamory is ruining society, but it's my beat: nerdy sci-fi bullshit.
It's a year beginning with a 2, which means there is drama over this year's WorldCon.
What is WorldCon?
We're all nerds here, but I know not all of us are SFF nerds, so for @2rafa and the handful of others who'd never lower themselves to reading shit with elves, WorldCon is the annual science fiction convention, held in a different city every year, that awards the Hugos, at one time considered the most prestigious award in science fiction. The drama and controversies over past WorldCons and Hugo Awards have been enumerated here often; at this point, as my lede says, it's practically an annual tradition. I don't collect links but maybe if you ask @gattsuru nicely he'll post some of the past dirt.
Usually these controversies are something Culture War-related. The Hugos are widely perceived to have gone fully Woke, and I must admit that I am one of those heavy SF readers who not only no longer cares much about the Hugos, whereas at one time I would have at least checked out the latest Hugo winner, I now consider them to be almost an anti-recommendation.
Just to give you an idea of the state of the Hugos: it's been ten years since a man won the Hugo for best novel (Cixin Liu and his translator Ken Liu (no relation) for The Three-Body Problem in 2015), and most years since then have seen between 0 and 2 men even nominated. This year actually features three men on the ballot (including Adrian Tchaikovsky nominated twice)! I'm rooting for Tchaikovsky since I actually read his books but, well, John Scalzi is the last white guy to get a Hugo, in 2013 (for one of his worst novels, Redshirts).
So anyway, technically this year's drama is not (so far) about the Hugos themselves, but about WorldCon (which this year is being held in Seattle).
What did they do this time?
Short version: They used ChatGPT to vet WorlCon panelists. Several WorldCon committee members resigned in protest, and the list of authors and other program participants doing likewise is growing.
https://file770.com/seattle-worldcon-2025-hugo-administrators-and-wsfs-division-head-resign/
https://www.patreon.com/posts/128296070
https://gizmodo.com/worldcon-2025-chatgpt-controversy-hugos-2000598351
Longer version: Reportedly there were as many as 1300 people applying to participate in various WorldCon programs this year: this would be book signings, readings, panels, workshops, etc. Obviously not everyone who wants to be on a panel can be, and WorldCon has to be selective about who it invites. The vetting is done by volunteers, and researching 1300 people must be pretty time consuming; apparently they had the bright idea of using ChatGPT do a search and summary of all prospective participants as a "first pass."
I assume they mostly want to weed out obvious crazies and literal Nazis and pedos, but given that WorldCon skews very woke nowadays, the vetting almost certainly includes looking for any "problematic" public statements or other transgressions in someone's background that might lead to a Cancellation or Drama.
Honestly, using an LLM to summarize and categorize your list of randos seems like a pretty good use of AI to me. Supposedly all final decisions were made by humans, but nonetheless, the concom is imploding.
If you're unaware, most artists and authors hate AI. This has also been covered extensively in past CW threads, but the stated reason for the disdain towards AI is that authors' and artists' work was "stolen" to train LLMs without compensation, but there is also a very real fear of being replaced.
This generalized antipathy has basically been extended to any use of AI at all, so even though the WorldCon committee is insisting there has been no use of generative AI, no final decisions made by AI, and that AI has nothing to do with any Hugo nominations or decisions, people are still Very Very Angry that it was used at all.
If you read the commentary, it's not just general AI-hate (though there is plenty of that), but also concern that the LLMs might have made Problematic Decisions. Obviously, people are bringing up hallucinations (what if ChatGPT made up a racist Twitter post?) and the possibility of false negatives, but, there is also concern about false positives. What if ChatGPT missed something Problematic? Again, supposedly humans were supposed to make the final decisions, but cynically, I think they're worried that ChatGPT might approve too many cishetwhitemales. Also much outrage at "Entering private data into an AI without permission" (i.e., typing someone's name into ChatGPT and asking it to do an Internet search).
This isn't as juicy as past WorldCon/Hugo dramas, but it's very Current Year. I cannot help finding it ironic that we're now at a place where science fiction fans are demanding that we ban AI tools.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
9mo ago
I can believe the writers thought the audience "didn't get the point" the first time and wanted to write a new movie with the "correct" message.
I think the more sinister conspiratorial nonsense - that the studios literally don't care about making a profit (!!) and deliberately did this as a "humiliation ritual" just to punish the audience, whom they hate - is ridiculous and a sign of how far down a rabbithole this sort of "THEY are out to get you" thinking can take you. Maybe there is a screenwriter somewhere chortling as xe/xir thinks "This will show those white incel losers!" but I am pretty sure there is no studio that will deliberately put out a money-loser because all the money-men are on board with a "punish incels" program.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
9mo ago
Set point theory is very popular among fat activists, yes.
People's metabolisms do vary (which is why "CICO" is both true and simplistic - the "burn rate" is not the same for every person). But nobody weighs 400 pounds because that's what their "set point" says they should weigh, and I have only ever met two kinds of severely obese people: those who admit they eat too much, and those who make up reasons why somehow normal rules of biology and physics are different for them.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
2yr ago
You're essentially arguing that black and Latino students should just accept the reality that they aren't as smart as white people, and be grateful that there are white people around to serve as role models.
Even if this were true, our society is not constructed such that we can assert a modern-day Great Chain of Being and expect the people born into the bottom rungs to accept it.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
2yr ago
Generic in-group bias would be a fully-formed explanation if the complaints about Jews were limited to their overrepresentation in banking and Hollywood, but the Jew-baiting posts very regularly make much broader assertions, that Jews are responsible for desegregation, affirmative action, increased immigration, laxer criminal justice, pornography, sexual liberation, feminism, and essentially, the entire liberal project, up to and including wokeism. Which is assumed to be a deliberate multigenerational campaign to undermine their neighbors and destroy their host society.
This only makes sense if you believe (a) Jews are just naturally evil for some reason; (b) it's some sort of biological imperative to conduct tribal warfare at a level that goes well beyond any "in-group bias" one sees in other ethnic groups. And some of the Joo-posters have made explicit HBD arguments to the effect that Jews just "evolved that way."
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
2yr ago
What made them think hiring subpar writers, rewriting lore, rewriting characters of one of the most popular fantasy IPs while simultaneously drafting off of the brand was a good idea?
I have no strong opinions about Tolkien, and I have not seen the show, but I see this come up a lot, and I think the answer is surprisingly obvious to people who aren't deeply invested in the fandom. This applies to everything from the MCU to LotR to Star Wars and Star Trek and every other property you care about.
Creators of new productions will very often hire writers who are not loving and doting fans but just in it for the paycheck, toss the source material, and ignore established lore, and the nerds will cry: "How could you do that? Don't you know that will make it suck?"
The answer is no, they don't know it will make it "suck" because they don't care if someone who's read the Silmarillion doesn't like what they did to Tolkien's lore. Nobody else (sigma the tiny, tiny percentage of the audience who's read the Silmarillion) cares either. MCU movies aren't made for you, the middle-aged dude who has boxes of X-Men and Avengers comics from the 80s in your cave. They are made for the new viewers they want to attract.
All they care about - all they care about - is getting more eyeballs. If reboots, reimaginings, and woke recastings will do that, that is what they will do. The tiny angry fists waved by a hundred thousand screaming fanboys is as nothing to the millions of (mostly young and not familiar with or invested in the source material) viewers they need to attract.
Now, an argument can be made that the work was popular in the first place because it was good, and tossing everything that made it good will make it bad. Sometimes that is true, sometimes it isn't. And of course bad writing is bad writing, so if RoP is bad because the writing is bad, it has little to do with how faithful the writers were to Tolkien and more to do with the fact that the writing is bad. Would it have been good if the writers were totally committed to Tolkien's vision? Who knows; maybe, probably not.
But fans really need to stop expecting that production studios care about whether it's "faithful" or "destroying the IP."
As for your other point: yes, they really do care more about making money than "pushing an agenda." They (the suits) will push an agenda if they think the agenda will make money. Writers and other creators on the team might be pushing agendas, to the degree they can get away with it, but the money men only care about whether it will be profitable. You'd see the whitest of all-white productions of the next Black Panther movie if suddenly black people stopped going to the movies, white people stopped watching anything with black people in it, and corporations no longer had to worry about how "lack of diversity" might affect the box office and critical reception (which affects the box office).
I very much doubt anyone in the head offices of Amazon or Sony or Disney is saying "Fuck next quarter's earnings, we need more diversity in this place, dammit!"
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
2yr ago
"Why does my outgroup push for obviously terrible things when we all know they don't actually believe the things they say they do?" Bonus: "Let me ask a leading question suggesting the uncharitable answer."
(Before you get indignant at my steelmanning the other side, I'll stipulate that I am not personally in favor of either open borders or lax criminal prosecution. Policy-wise, and probably even politically, I am probably much closer to you than the single college-educated women you so despise.)
Here's the actual answer: people in favor of open borders actually believe open borders are good. They are not nationalists and largely regard nationalism with distrust if not contempt; they believe freedom of movement, and particularly the freedom of people to seek better economic opportunities in wealthier countries, should not be hindered. They largely see Westerners living in wealthy nations as benefiting from a manifestly unfair birthplace luck-of-the-draw, and don't see why Guatemalans or Bangladeshis or Nigerians or Syrians should have to suffer just because they were not so lucky.
They (including even the women) do not think in terms of "military-aged men" (and definitely not in terms of "third-world men") and its implications.
They support lax prosecution of criminals for similar bleeding-heart reasons: they really do believe the rhetoric that fuels "defund the police" and BLM and "disproportionate impact on marginalized communities." They think they are being compassionate to the oppressed.
Stated more bluntly, you are asking "Why do they want to unleash hordes of violent rapists upon themselves?" You are "confused" because you don't believe that their motives are actually what they say they are, and you don't believe that they don't perceive the same outcome (hordes of violent rapists) that you do. Even if what you believe is actually correct, they don't believe that. They aren't endorsing it for some secret unstated reason they won't admit to.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
1yr ago
I have a genuine question, because I haven't been able to find a reliable answer:
Is the "blue octopus" actually an anti-Semitic dogwhiste, like, anywhere? Or is this an association that was just invented yesterday to pile on Greta Thunberg?
I've seen the infamous Nazi cartoon, of course, and it's not unique, but octopuses have long been used to symbolize conspiracies. A fishy alien thing with lots of tentacles reaching everywhere makes a pretty convenient metaphor for any group you're accusing of being sinister infiltrators.
I have never before yesterday, however, seen the claim that blue octopus plushies, specifically, are some sort of secret mascot used by white nationalists.
If they are, I seriously doubt that Thunberg was aware of it and deliberately signaling her own hatred of Jews. So this seems a lot like people freaking out over the "okay" signal.
I also suspect that, just like the "okay" signal, we're now going to see actual white nationalists unironically adopting blue octopus plushies as mascots.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
11mo ago
I am not a fan of overusing "Orwellian" but this is as close a case as I've seen to all those comments about everyone receiving a simultaneous "download" of their new talking points.
"Border czar" is not and never was an official title - so when everyone says "Harris was never appointed border czar" - yes, technically that is true. (Technically, the Vice President has precisely one official duty, which is breaking ties in the Senate. Other than that, the VP has only whatever duties and authority the President assigns, and there have been VPs who basically faffed around for four years with nothing to do.) But clearly Harris was referred to as "border czar" and everyone understood what that meant, even if it was a strictly informal title.
Frustratingly, mentioning this to my Harris-supporting friends just gets sighs and eye-rolls, like "Why does this even matter?" And how good a job she did as "border czar" probably doesn't matter all that much - what matters (to me) is watching the entire media apparatus turn on a dime to reinforce DNC talking points and everyone thinks that's fine and that people trying to point out the discrepancy are just bad-faith Harris-haters.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
2yr ago
To be fair, you can hear that right from the horse's mouth. She herself relates this behavior directly to Tikkun Olam:
Whether or not you agree with individual Jews who believe that things that like gay rights and affirmative action are good, there is still a disconnect between "They're doing these things because they believe they're good" and "They're doing these things because they are driven by a Jewish impulse to corrupt and destroy." But I take it that you are, in fact, endorsing the HBD theory of Jewish nefariousness?
In other words, when all the people of the world abandon false gods and recognize the Jewish tribal god Yahweh, the world will have been perfected.
This is essentially what most religious adherents believe.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
1yr ago
Dude, look, as a fellow atheist, lose the edgy atheist schtick. We can debate religion here, you can debate the merits of religion, but just laying down "hurr hurr religion is just wrongdumb fantasy nonsense" doesn't actually get you anywhere and gets you reported a lot for being obnoxious.
I guess I'll just use this thread to say: I fucking hate this election.
I hate my choices. I hate having to choose which shitty option might taste slightly less like shit. I hate choosing from two stupid, bumbling mediocre embarrassments and knowing one of them is going to be the fucking President of the United States of America. "Vote for the lesser of two evils" has been a motto representing resigned acceptance of political reality my entire life (I have the Cthulhu for President t-shirt and everything), but never have I felt it so keenly. They're both bad and repulsive, and I honestly don't know which of them will actually be worse for the country because I expect either of them to be terrible. I have said before I probably won't even vote, for the first time since I turned 18. (At least for president; I'll still probably vote for local/state candidates.)
And it's entirely the fault of both parties for putting us here. The Republicans, for letting MAGA cultists take over the party and drive all serious grown-ups out, and the Democrats, for letting bad faith woke identity politics take over everything. And both of them, for turning us into a gerontocracy that very effectively shuts younger candidates out before they can even sniff a primary.
If you held a gun to my head and forced me to choose, I guess it would be Kamala. But I might take the bullet instead.
I think Trump will be more damaging to the economy, and I think he will epically fuck up what's left of America's standing in the world. I think he will be an embarrassment who fails to accomplish any of the things his followers think he will (just like last time) and what he does accomplish he will fuck up. I think Harris will continue our inflationary money-isn't-real spiral into economic doom, hand out more gobs of cash to whatever identity group is most effective at yelling and screaming, and I think Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping will roll her like a floured chicken breast. She's a midwit mediocrity who should never have come within line of sight of the Presidency, and I cannot believe how quickly I watched people in real time shift vibes to Kamala-enthusiasm, Kamalanation, Kamala is brat (W. T. F????) and pretend they had always been enthusiastic about her. Way back in 2019, when she was being floated as a Democratic candidate and I knew little about her, I admit I was tepidly favorable towards her because she seemed like maybe the least bad of a mediocre lot, but nothing she's done since has impressed, and she seems like Generic Extruded Political Product.
But, you know, Trump. I do not have TDS, I do not think he is Literally Hitler, but I do think he's a con, a huckster, an embarrassing buffoon who I believe actually loves America as much as I believe he goes to church on Sunday and has ever read the Bible in his life. I think he totally would become an absolute dictator if he could manage it, but it would require too much effort and political acumen and cunning, which he does not have. He has a huge personality and charisma, and some people think that translates into him being a skilled politician. He's not. He's got performer's instincts and a gift for graft. This doesn't really make him unique among American presidents, but it makes him uniquely bad in this time and place.
This sucks.
So I will repeat what I said a few weeks ago: my only consolation is going to be breaking out the popcorn and watching the wailing and gnashing of teeth post-election night. If Kamala wins, I will read the Motte and other places for the rage, the futile fist-waving, the impotent Internet tough-guy promises to Res1st and Retrn and start a civil war or some shit. If Trump wins, I will read Twitter for the wailing, the gnashing of teeth, and the hordes of smug, self-righteous fucks driven to existential despair, and I will drink their tears.
This is not nice, it is not charitable, it is not noble. It is petty and mean and beneath me. It is my coping mechanism, because this election sucks.
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