The Sneetches 2: Sylvester McMonkey McBean's Infernal Throat-Punching Contraption Machine

On my last post about race, made just a bit before Christmas, I had more than one person lining up to tell me that racism cannot exist where there is no racist intent.

The topic of the post was the now internet-infamous HP webcam that tracks light faces better than dark ones, which obviously means that it would tend to work best out of the box for someone our society identifies as "white". The YouTube video in the post gives a pretty stark demonstration of the extent of this.

In one of my comment replies, I said this to one of the commenters who insisted we only judge intentions when discussing racism:

If we build a system that punches every third person in the throat, that system is a problem whether it's an example of poor design or sinister design, isn't it? And ideally we should be able to talk about that problem and why it's a problem without someone jumping into the conversation to issue us a criteria based on unprovable speculations of intention that we must fulfill before we're allowed to discuss it.

I used "every third person" as the example to emphasize that the standard it's using is both arbitrary and predictable... it's not a machine that we can easily pretend sometimes punches some random people in the throat, we can clearly see what it's what doing: it's punching every third person in the throat.

There might be some corner cases where two people are walking abreast or a whole crowd of people runs past it and throws off the count a bit, but anybody who points to these scenarios and says "So you can see that, in fairness, this proves that there is no problem with every third person getting punched in the throat in our country today." could be safely written off as missing the bigger picture, right?

In fact, we would probably wonder at such a person's willingness to excuse and defend systematic throat-punching. Do they benefit from it somehow? Do they believe that there are whole classes of people who deserve to be punched in the throat while others don't? Maybe it's as simple as they walked past the machine without getting punched so whenever somebody starts talking about how much it hurt to get punched in the throat or how they don't want to see anybody else get punched, they feel like they're being accused of something or blamed for something.

They didn't build the machine, after all. They didn't set the People Counter to 3. It sucks that some people get punched in the throat but it has nothing to do with them!

The fact is, we have built and do continue to build and maintain (sometimes passively, sometimes actively) many systems that metaphorically punch people in the throat for arbitrary reasons, giving some people head starts and holding others back. We all live within these systems. Our ways of life are supported by them. Our ways of thinking are supported by them.

And as long as these systems exist, we don't need racist intent to participate in racist actions and to generate racially-biased outcomes. The fact that the status quo is the status quo means that no one person has to exert a tremendous amount of effort to reinforce it.

Tomorrow I'll post a follow-up I've written with some specific examples of "throat-punching machines" we deal with. I was going to make this all one post, but given the reception I usually get when I write about race I think it's best to deal with a smaller number of points at a time than a larger one.

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And in The Continuing Adventures of Conversations That Aren't Happening Here: "helpful" discussions about what sort of tone people who are sick of racism should strike or what terminology is least likely to result in the shedding of white plutocrat tears. I'm not deleting anything but I've frozen the current discussions on those topics... anyone who thinks they have something that really really needs to be said on such a subject is more than welcome to take it up in their own space.

The Corpse Brideshead Revisited

Part 2 of the "Throat-Punching Machine" post will go up this evening, after I've got some other stuff done. In the meantime, I have it in my mind to write about The Corpse Bride, which I finally saw for the first time while I was in Maryland last month. Yes, the first time... I never got to the theater when it was out an then somehow never got around to watching it on home video.

It was... good, I suppose. I feel like its marketing campaign having consisted mostly of "Hey, you liked The Nightmare Before Christmas, right? Of course you did. So you're going to see this." might have done it a disservice, though, because The Corpse Bride is definitely a movie haunted by the specters of what has come before it.

I feel like it could have been a masterpiece... compared to TNBC, it has a darker, more mature storyline and a very neo-Edwardian (where "Edward" refers, of course, to Gorey) sensibility in many ways. But it doesn't have nearly as much... I don't know. There just wasn't as much there there.

The musical aspect just doesn't hold up as well as it did in TNBC. The ensemble song welcoming Victor when he arrives in the underworld was a bit of a stand-out, but it was no "This Is Halloween". None of the other songs really stuck with me that well.. Part of this might be the characters not obviously lending themselves to showstopping numbers... the male lead is not JACK!!! THE PUMP-KIN!! KING! and the villain is certainly not Mr. Oogie Boogie.

That's not to say that it would have been impossible to write some breakout songs for the main characters... a song where the villain reveals his (scarcely concealed from the audience sinister) intentions while singing about the joys of being a scoundrel, a bounder, and a cad ("cad" forming a convenient rhyme with a line like "since I was a lad")... showstoppers just doesn't come quite as naturally when dealing with the muted gray humans of The Corpse Bride compared to the vibrantly gray inhabitants of Halloween Town.

I think under the circumstances... focusing more on the story and casting actors not primarily known for their singing... they might have decided to ditch the musical angle altogether. Although, the leads did of course go on to carry a musical by supplementing their singing abilities with their sheer presence and the stunning visuals arranged around them, so again, it's not impossible that they could have made it work as a musical. They just would have needed to put more oomph into that side of things.

The other problem was that the world of the dead never seemed like a whole world to me... it felt like we were seeing merely an antechamber, but at the same time, there wasn't a tremendous sense of something bigger and vaster and weirder further down the rabbit hole. Considering that this was created and directed by the man who gave us the Waiting Room of the Dead in Beetlejuice, that's disappointing.

It wasn't a bad movie. I'd like to see it again. It will probably always occupy a fond place in my heart because of the circumstances under which I watched it. But I expected "If you thought you liked The Nightmare Before Christmas, you're going to love this." and I got "If you loved The Nightmare Before Christmas, you're going to think you like this."

I just realized...

...that the post two spaces down this page, where I spent much time and energy and spoons engaging with someone who was trying to be "helpful" in steering the anti-racist conversation to "more productive" channels by avoiding words like "racist" that might hurt people's feelings and cause them to be less receptive to, you know, justice and tolerance and junk didn't even call anybody "racist". The post used the word "racist" exactly three times, in only two sentences, both of which dealing with the idea of racist actions arising without racist intent.

Apparently we can't even use the word "racist" to describe how much racist intent we think people in general don't have without it hurting people's feelings to the point that conversation about racism is pointless.

Ugh.

Well, I'm done with it. Not with blogging about social issues, but about engaging with derailers. I have a tendency to give a lot of slack in not assuming the worst, especially since I know that unlike dedicated social issues bloggers my audience is often not going to be immersed in the conversation to begin with... but... I just don't have the time or energy to say something meaningful and then deal with this kind of shit and also do anything else, like write the stories that I enjoy writing and people enjoy reading.

There was a mod post up on Shapely Prose recently called "We Are The Boss Of You" that was restating and expanding on some of their comment policies over there, in particular the "this is not a democracy" aspect. One of the things that I really appreciated was reading the commentary form the site moderators (and they have like 5 of them now) about how hard it is, how draining it can be, to moderate online discussion.

It really is.

If you let an iffy comment stand because you're afraid of looking like the bad guy or because you don't want to assume the worst, chances are you've already invested more time than it deserves in arriving at that conclusion. Multiply that by a few dozen times... and then there's dealing with people who don't accept your decision when you don't let a comment or a line of discussion stand.

You're either second-guessing yourself and letting the lowest common denominator run roughshod over everybody else, or you're being a "tyrant", a "control freak", a (would you like a side order of misogyny with your point-missing today?) "bitch"*.

All very true. I sometimes go weeks without looking at the Tales of MU comments (which means some languish in moderation queue for weeks) just because it burns me out so badly dealing with them.

And on this post that was basically "We are in charge, there is no court of appeals.", what was the response? There were a couple (or at least one) flounce and damned near four hundred people saying words to the effect of "Thank you! This is why your site is the only one where the comments don't make me headdesk!"

This post doesn't really have much more of a point than 1) I needed to vent and 2) I need to rethink my approach to comments, on here and elsewhere. I mean, even while I crack down on the worst things I've always let some pretty heinously gendered/misogynistic language slide on the MU and MoarMU comments and I know that this sort of thing drives away other commenters who might have something more interesting to say... I know this because this is the most common thing people tell me when they meet me in real life.

Not "_____ is my favorite character! Can we see more of _____?" Not "I love your work." No, "I hate the comment section. I love your work but I don't know how you can stand to look at them." The fact is I can't. At one point I let the comment section die completely and left it off the site for months. Not a week goes by that I don't think about doing that again... let it be someone else's problem.

I don't know. I'm going to go take a bubble bath and then I'm going to write.

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*The Conversation We're Not Having On This Post: how "bitch" is or isn't misogynistic, how you and/or all your friends call yourselves "bitches", any cutesy acronyms about what it stands for.

Business Update - Important News For Diploma-Waiters.

Okay... here's the business post I was going to post last week.

This week, in addition to trying to do slightly more fiction writing than I did last week and the week before, I'm also copying the old Star Harbor archive over to the current site, which I'll start updating again once I have everything up where it can be read by the public (and me! It's hard to write an ongoing story when I don't have easy access to What's Come Before). I let the registration on the other site lapse, unfortunately... the stories are all still there in a database but not in the right format to just import into Wordpress, so I'm going to be doing a lot of copying and pasting and manually reformatting of a few things. Not fun, not creative, not terribly fulfilling, but necessary.

My other non-TOMU goal is to wrap up the current chapter of Tribe. I've said this before and it's still true: my biggest problem with Tribe is second-guessing everything on the basis of how much I like how the first chapter came out. I'm going to try to do that less. I'm also going to write out outlines of future chapters. I didn't do this for the first one, but I went into it knowing the beginning, middle, and end of them and it made a big difference. For the others, I either didn't know the middle or I didn't know the end.

I write Tribe very differently from most of what I write, and apparently it shows to the point that I have had three different people forget that it's me and ask me if I've ever read it.

I'm way behind on totaling fundraising and updating the sponsor lists. That's going to be my task for the weekend.

Now, the difficult news:

The MU diplomas.

I beat myself up over my failure to deliver on these more than I do anything else. It's utterly fruitless and completely counterproductive to do so, especially when it leaves me paralyzed when I'm trying to do something to address them. When I was in Maryland I resolved to suck it up and take care of business there as soon as I got home, but I've since realized that I don't even have a good copy of the template files.

So... for the 12 or so people who never got them (I do have a list, and I'm going to go directly into my PayPal archive and double check that), I'm going to be issuing refunds. I'm sorry. I should have done this sooner, when it became apparent that what I was doing wasn't working. I'm sure some people will pop up and say they don't want a refund, they'd rather wait until I get this back on track, or even that they don't care at this point and would rather consider it a donation... but I'm going to be doing this across the board. I feel the need to resolve this and get it taken care of, to get a clean slate.

You folks have waited long enough. Some of you might not even need or want a diploma any more, some of you might have changed addresses. If anybody still wants a diploma, you probably will have the opportunity to order one again, once I've balanced this out. I'll log orders as they come in using Google Calendar, to make sure I get them taken care of.

This has weighed on me so much... I don't want to sound like I'm a victim or a martyr for what is my failing. This was my first wholly unassisted business venture and I only got about a 50% success rate on it and that is not good. I've held off on launching some other things because of the doubt and guilt that I've felt over this, like "what right do I have to put out more books/make new t-shirts/whatever when I haven't delivered on this?"

But at the end of the day, me not making a living doesn't help me fix things.

So, anyway, at the middle of the month I'm going to start issuing refunds in the order that the unfilled orders were received. I should have everybody's money back to them by the end of the month.

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Okay, at this point since my goal is to make things right for people, if you never received a diploma and really want to me to count it as a donation just say something on this post. I mean, if I send money back to you and you turn around and send it right back, that benefits PayPal and nobody else. If nothing else, that will help me make sure the people who want refunds get them faster.