Twitter mob gets fantasy novel cancelled.

[adcarrymaokai]

Why is it a bad thing? The Internet lets people with no means to learn things. Sure, many people in the world don't have Internet access, but it helps the ones who do. It helps teenagers who get bullied in school to find communities around their interests (well, there is cyberbullying, too). It helps people who can't afford textbooks to learn something new and do well in school. My life without the Internet was really limited.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Pulling J.K. Rowling here? That wasn't sarcasm until you said so.

What does this even mean? I'm not even remotely talking about J.K. Rowling. I've never read a Harry Potter book, nor have I seen any of the movies. That is one franchise that doesn't interest me at all.

I actually hate reading and therefore don't read books.* With other content, like games, I actually get the game, or better yet a demo, and play it to form my opinion of whether I like it or not. For something like Civilization, there are literally let's play videos from developers showing gameplay, so you can figure out whether that's something you want to play or not. Game footage is not an opinion (though it can certainly be manipulated to present the game in a better light, but that's capitalism).

*I am just an unimaginative person who can only read math and computer science textbooks and who needs a visual component in fiction works to be immersed in them, which is why my choice of entertainment is video games and youtube/cartoons (cartoons are generally more grotesquely fictional than movies or TV series).

Okay, that explains your dismissal of book reviews. You're missing a lot of great stories, though.

I guess you wouldn't even want to read fiction based on a video game? As my NaNoWriMo project in November, I began novelizing a computer game I got into back in August. I'm still working on it and having a great time with it (especially trying to patch up a couple of plot holes).

I guess with the advent of the internet all novelty ceases to exist. If there is an obscure band you just google it. you don't go into a record store anymore and pick something based on the cover, or based on hearsay. it's literally right infront of you, it's in your phone, in your laptop, in your pc. If there is an obscure game you watch an LP before you buy it. if there's an actor/actress you like, you can find high quality pictures of every single one of their limbs, and probably private pictures of them doing private stuff, in a matter of miliseconds. if there is some faraway island no one has ever set foot on, chances are there are google photos of it. if there is some distant star, you head over to the NASA page and check out how it looks from the hubble space telescope or something. the entire world is at your feet 24/7, 365 days a year. we're ****** aren't we?

When you've lived more of your life pre-internet, you realize that there's a lot that still isn't online. Like my favorite episodes of The Beachcombers.

 

[Lexicus]

What does this even mean? I'm not even remotely talking about J.K. Rowling. I've never read a Harry Potter book, nor have I seen any of the movies. That is one franchise that doesn't interest me at all.

Presumably J.K. Rowling on Twitter said something seriously and then later tried to claim it was sarcastic.

 

[yung.carl.jung]

Why is it a bad thing? The Internet lets people with no means to learn things. Sure, many people in the world don't have Internet access, but it helps the ones who do. It helps teenagers who get bullied in school to find communities around their interests (well, there is cyberbullying, too). It helps people who can't afford textbooks to learn something new and do well in school. My life without the Internet was really limited.

no, see, that's one of the few good things about the net. however something that's really been making my brain itch lately is this: why is there no universal (at least english..), interdisciplinary learning software? why is wikipedia and google scholar the best we can do? how in the hell has no one attempted this project yet? it doesn't seem that hard to achieve with the information already out there, yet we still have the same goddamn school system as prussians did in the 19th century. talk about progressivism. we have this beautiful ressource and are stuck reading text on our small phone screens. idgi, I really don't. this should be the thing we invest our ressources in. screw schools, this can enable every individual to cater to their own forte.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Presumably J.K. Rowling on Twitter said something seriously and then later tried to claim it was sarcastic.

Ohforpetessake. I am the person who was being sarcastic about the information presented in the OP. The other poster was unable to detect my sarcasm. I don't care what J.K. Rowling said about anything. She is not relevant to my posts.

 

[Lexicus]

@Valka D'Ur I recognized your sarcasm. I think @adcarrymaokai misunderstood you somehow.

 

[adcarrymaokai]

I actually still don't get how it's sarcasm when it's literally repeating the painfully bad take from the OP.

 

[Lexicus]

Think about it...that's why it's sarcasm, lol

 

[adcarrymaokai]

I guess?

 

[Valka D'Ur]

I actually still don't get how it's sarcasm when it's literally repeating the painfully bad take from the OP.

I guess maybe Lexicus and I have interacted enough that he knows how to recognize when I'm being sarcastic (most times; he's missed a few over the years). You and I have hardly interacted at all, so you don't know how to recognize when I'm being sarcastic.

Here's a hint: I don't usually use the word "Wow" in any other way.

 

[Lexicus]

Here's a hint: I don't usually use the word "Wow" in any other way.

okay off to sacrifice to the meme gods now, just had to do it

 

[adcarrymaokai]

I guess maybe Lexicus and I have interacted enough that he knows how to recognize when I'm being sarcastic (most times; he's missed a few over the years). You and I have hardly interacted at all, so you don't know how to recognize when I'm being sarcastic.

Here's a hint: I don't usually use the word "Wow" in any other way.

Ok, thanks for clarifying.

Okay, that explains your dismissal of book reviews. You're missing a lot of great stories, though.

I like consuming stories with a visual component. Like I said, cartoons allow for very grotesque storylines and genre bending. There is this anime I watched recently... the anime itself is probably for 12-15 year-old boys, but somehow it touched on very real topics of disability, racism, dictatorship, job duty vs morality, vengeance and forgiveness, etc. It was actually amazing how it went into all these themes without detracting from out the storyline. And given that was fantasy genre, I hardly see something like that in a movie format, and as a book it just wouldn't have the oomph I am looking for in visual experiences.

I am just a visual and auditorial person: even in college I preferred slides, lectures, and practical assignments to reading textbooks. I also prefer songs to poetry.

I guess you wouldn't even want to read fiction based on a video game?

Nope. I play a few games which have spawned lots of fan fiction based on lore, but I am actually not interested in what video game characters do outside of the game. I don't play games for the storyline, but for visual stimulation and for competition. My enjoyment in games comes performing actions and achieving results, which is why I play competitive fighting games and not much of storytelling games. Just a preference.

When you've lived more of your life pre-internet, you realize that there's a lot that still isn't online. Like my favorite episodes of The Beachcombers.

I have grown up with the Internet, but I am intentionally trying to reduce the time I spend either on my phone or on my computer. I don't watch TV, but I want to do some things like dance classes, exercising, cooking, etc. Something physical. But it's still great that the option to look something up is there.

 

[Patine]

This is the novel: "In the Cyrilian Empire, Affinites are reviled and enslaved. Their varied abilities to control the world around them are unnatural--dangerous. And Anastacya Mikhailov, the crown princess, might be the most monstrous of them all. Her deadly Affinity to blood is her curse and the reason she has lived her life hidden behind palace walls."

To those wondering about what the terrible crime was - it was having non-race based slavery in a fantasy universe, thereby, somehow, denying the experience of black Americans. This is now the party line of the social justice movement.

Spoiler NSFW :

You can read more about the craziness here.

The slavery taboo tied specifically to African-American sensibilities in all cases, even if unrelated, is plain ridiculous. Practically every pre-Industrial, urban, sedentary, large-scale-agrarian society that had any military or political over it's enemies at any time has, at some point in it's history, practiced slavery to fill a perceived need (or convenience) for large amounts of unskilled labour, work, and other duties. It was NOT just the Trans-Atlantic Black slave trade. And, it must be remembered, that the narrative of ALL those West African slaves being kidnapped by European coastal village raiders in the night is utterly false. Pre-colonial West African nations like Songhai, Ghana, Mali, Bornu, Egibo, Dahomey, the Fula Empire, etc., who practiced slavery of each other's people captured in endless wars, sold those slaves to the Europeans in exchange for firearms and other manufactured goods of the day, because, to those West African monarch and merchants, who grew very wealthy off the trade, viewed said slaves as commodities, the same as the gold, ivory, and black pepper they also traded (a reason I disagree with debt forgiveness for those West African nations because of slavery, as all of them, except Liberia and Sierra Leone, claim continuity and succession from one or more of those pre-colonial monarchies, some even in their national Constitutions, and Ghana and Mali actually carry the same names as two of them). Mauritania, the last internationally-recognized sovereign nation in the world to criminalize slavery formally, did so as recently as 1984. The terms "serf," "thrall," and the Hebrew word translated in modern English Biblical translations as "servant" are also effectively words for "slave" in their contemporary contexts, and the "Immortals" of the Achaemenid-Dynasty Persian Empire and the Mamelukes of the Abbasid Caliphate were originally slave soldiers. So many Wonders of the Ancient and Medieval World were built partially or completely by slave labour. Aesop and Shaherazade, legendary serial storytellers, were both slaves in life. African-Americans were not unique as victims of institutional slavery in world history.

 

[Estebonrober]

The slavery taboo tied specifically to African-American sensibilities in all cases, even if unrelated, is plain ridiculous. Practically every pre-Industrial, urban, sedentary, large-scale-agrarian society that had any military or political over it's enemies at any time has, at some point in it's history, practiced slavery to fill a perceived need (or convenience) for large amounts of unskilled labour, work, and other duties. It was NOT just the Trans-Atlantic Black slave trade. And, it must be remembered, that the narrative of ALL those West African slaves being kidnapped by European coastal village raiders in the night is utterly false. Pre-colonial West African nations like Songhai, Ghana, Mali, Bornu, Egibo, Dahomey, the Fula Empire, etc., who practiced slavery of each other's people captured in endless wars, sold those slaves to the Europeans in exchange for firearms and other manufactured goods of the day, because, to those West African monarch and merchants, who grew very wealthy off the trade, viewed said slaves as commodities, the same as the gold, ivory, and black pepper they also traded (a reason I disagree with debt forgiveness for those West African nations because of slavery, as all of them, except Liberia and Sierra Leone, claim continuity and succession from one or more of those pre-colonial monarchies, some even in their national Constitutions, and Ghana and Mali actually carry the same names as two of them). Mauritania, the last internationally-recognized sovereign nation in the world to criminalize slavery formally, did so as recently as 1984. The terms "serf," "thrall," and the Hebrew word translated in modern English Biblical translations as "servant" are also effectively words for "slave" in their contemporary contexts, and the "Immortals" of the Achaemenid-Dynasty Persian Empire and the Mamelukes of the Abbasid Caliphate were originally slave soldiers. So many Wonders of the Ancient and Medieval World were built partially or completely by slave labour. Aesop and Shaherazade, legendary serial storytellers, were both slaves in life. African-Americans were not unique as victims of institutional slavery in world history.

So should we bring it back then? Seems like it did an awful lot of good and people everywhere liked it?

 

[Valka D'Ur]

I saw the post as a useful history lesson, not as a call to bring back slavery.

 

[Estebonrober]

I saw the post as a useful history lesson, not as a call to bring back slavery.

While I consider this particular case of twitter warrior types shutting down a novel that involves slavery in the story line as completely asinine and honestly in my opinion unacceptably silly. I also don't like the idea of excusing European slave trade of Africans as excusable because that's the way things were and so its all ok and people should just ignore it as part of our history. African slavery was different in some sense because of the logic behind enslaving a "lesser" people, "lesser" to some extent it was argued they weren't quite human. Chattel slavery that the Europeans exercised on Africans was different and particularly abusive. This is all long after Europeans had abolished slavery technically within their own nations.

Idk it seemed to me to be minimizing chattel slavery of africans by europeans. I could have read it wrong.

 

[Lexicus]

I saw the post as a useful history lesson, not as a call to bring back slavery.

It's terrible history. It contains at least one outright false assertion (African Americans were the historically unique victims of racialized chattel slavery, a phenomenon seen nowhere else in world history). It implies that the development of the West African slave-trading states was endogenous to Africa rather than driven by the demand for slaves to work in the European colonies in the New World.

 

[Patine]

So should we bring it back then? Seems like it did an awful lot of good and people everywhere liked it?

Obviously you completely misunderstood the tenor of what I was saying if that is your conclusion. But you've misunderstood another of my posts on another thread that dramatically and grossly, too...

It's terrible history. It contains at least one outright false assertion (African Americans were the historically unique victims of racialized chattel slavery, a phenomenon seen nowhere else in world history). It implies that the development of the West African slave-trading states was endogenous to Africa rather than driven by the demand for slaves to work in the European colonies in the New World.

You're statement here COULD EASILY be turned around and be YOU saying that, because the VAST MAJORITY of people in history who've suffered from, and endured, slavery DIDN'T suffer from racialized chattel slavery, that their ordeals, tribulations, bondage, hardships, and the injustices inflicted upon them, DON'T COUNT and are not meaningful, because, as not being the victims of one specific type of slavery, they can just be disregarded. They're not TRULY victims of slavery. :S

 

[Valka D'Ur]

I could have read it wrong.

Yes, I think you did. I didn't see any excuses for slavery, just a reminder that the Europeans and Americans were not the only ones engaging in it.

 

[Peuri]

They might have had an influence on this phenomenon, I wouldn't dismiss that claim out of hand. But if you twist what someone has said to fit exactly what you want to hear, then the connection is utterly lost, no?

I think you are justified in bringing up Foucault, since some of the Twitter / Tumblr crowd tries to use the power structure / power dynamics to justify their beliefs. The idea that representation is power of course didn't originate with Foucault at all, and is something I would personally agree with, and I really don't see how people can't. This is something you will also find in Edward Said and his companions. Possibly even a justified critique, albeit not for this specific book.

Derrida I don't really understand why you bring him up (and I think neither do you?). Can you put in laymans terms what makes deconstructionism relevant for the SJW/Twitter Outrage kind of ideology?

Intersectional feminism (what I think you are referring to) I honestly don't want to delve too deep into because I'm not well read. Judith Butler is definitely an SJW favorite, but honestly what I do know of her is Gender Performance Theory, and it is the utmost basic, unspectacular and generally obvious theory I've ever read. I believed in gender performance theory before I even knew it existed, and I am sure so did many other people. But Butler probably had a profound influence on online feminism, that much I'd agree with.

I think with Roland Barthes you did not hit the spot. If the intention of the author is irrelevant then surely there would be no point in attacking the author, or, as in this specific case: Her intentions of (consciously) marginalizing POC. Because those are some of the claims thrown into her face. If anything I think Barthes could be an antidote to what we're seeing here, a kind of positive nihilism that doesn't concern itself at all with the implications of the author and only sees the text as text. Because after all this is what this whole hate campaign was about, deep within. Attacking the author. The book is a scapegoat.

I’m sure most of what I write is oxen dung, since I don’t have a degree in continental philosophy, just the very very very basics of what I studied at the uni and stuff I’ve picked on the way. But let me try to clarify how I see as those ideas coming together to concoct these controversies again and again:


There is a text, an utterance or a piece of art somewhere. The interpreter comes and assesses the material. The interpreter analyses the material for it’s hidden cultural structures, meanings and cues (Derrida), ones that are often unseen by the uninitiated in wokeness. The interpreter takes moral umbrage, because the text has these structures, meanings and cues that uphold normative power (Foucault) in favour of the status quo, and as the status quo is deemed immoral, the text itself is immoral also. The interpreter does not care to ask what the author meant, because the author’s intentions are irrelevant, since the interpreter and their interpretations are paramount (a twisted sort of death of the author), and the harm that the interpretations cause them (viewpoint epistemology). As such it is justified to attack the author, even if the author’s intentions are irrelevant, because the author intentionally or not is upholding the status quo, and is therefore morally suspect, and indeed causing harm. This is all done in incredible bad faith of course, but you are fighting literal nazis™, so why pull any punches?

Maybe you don't need those theoretical frameworks for such analysis, but that's basically what I see them as doing.

Most of what you say really isn't wrong, it's your other post where you said that these people are just "taking ideas to their logical conclusion" where you went off the rails.

Well, I’m just glad it isn’t “even wrong”. I will concede and say that adding the word “logical” was pushing it, just that these people are pushing the tools discussed to “an” extreme. I did my master’s thesis in the field of conceptual history, and I’ve dabbled in philosophy of language, so I certainly can appreciate the linguistic turn that people like Foucault precipitated.

Also, who in the ever loving **** sees Twitter as the marketplace of ideas, besides Donald Trump?

I don’t know, seems like the place where a lot of cultural discussions are had by people. To be fair, I’ve never used it. Just seems to me that every other week or so there is news about how someone started some outrage about something or the other. Sounds like the place where ideas are peddled to the public. Maybe that’s just my personal myopia, but it seems to have a lot of influence on the ideas people have.

If you ask three people where the intellectual roots of SJWism and political correctness come from, you will get three replies:

The sensible person will point you towards Edward Said and Judith Butler, because they're taught in university a lot and are relatively easy to understand, and to misunderstand and corrupt. Those people are also cited by actual SJWs, so I think they're fair game to some degree.

Interesting. Got any articles on this? I’m really interested in the intellectual roots of this phenomenon. I don't know much about Said other than that he coined the concept of orientalism. Butler is more familier. How did these two have an effect?

The uninformed person will point you towards "postmodernists" and drop names like Lacan, Derrida, Baudrillard, etc, and reveal their ignorance.

The nazi will point you towards Frankfurt school, mostly Adorno and Benjamin, and claim that it was "cultural marxists" that started it all, even though it turns out Adorno was a horrible reactionary who hated the student revolts and thought Jazz music was obscene

*Phew*, dodged a bullet there. I was just uninformed, could have been a nazi, though.

I actually see the intellectual root of "PC culture" in totalitarianism, and the way totalitarianism showed us how easy to was to police speech. You don't even have to be as authoritarian as Stalin or Hitler, in fact it was regimes like the GDR where political correctness and policing of speech was most successful.

Yes, the conclusion is totalitarian, but that would be kind of a weird place to see the intellectual roots of this “movement” being in. I don't see many of them seeing that what they are doing is in any way related to totalitarianism, quite the opposite. They seem to see the status quo as totalitarian.

@Dachs, thanks for posting those Vulture pieces, just finished reading the second one, nicely informative.

She has a podcast on bloggingheads.tv with Pheobe Maltz Bovy: Feminine chaos. John McWhorter, who wrote the Atlantic piece you linked, is a frequent visitor on the same platform on The Glenn Show.