prof_pangaea | the failening

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the failening

this probably doesn't need to be said to anyone who will actually read it, but i thought i'd make it clear nontheless. statements that are inappropriate in all circumstances:

Also, while it's not exactly on the subject, I'd be unwilling to accept a Doctor that is non-Caucasian appearing. And no, this is not due to any latent racist views on my part. I just don't see the character working that way.

I don't want a black Doctor. Because I want to fancy him and I don't really find black men attractive.

saying the doctor can't be non-white because the character doesn't "work that way"? racist. justifying not wanting a black doctor because you don't find black men attractive? racist. no, this is not up for debate. this should be clear, and yet apparently isn't to some people. mentioning that statements like this are racist is not an attack against whoever might have said it. it's a statement of fact. if someone says something racist they can own up to the racism of their statement or try and explain it away, it doesn't change facts.

i was much wordier in other places but ya'll shouldn't need this to be explained to you so i think we're good.

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*headdesk* And just to make it more fun, some assholes on the meme are trying to pull the "but race is meaningless, therefore there's no such thing as racism" trick. As though the biological meaninglessness of race (which is true) somehow negates the incredible power of race's social and political meanings.

And I'm just too fucking tired and depressed already to wade in there and try to school people.

lolcoholic seems to be deleting most of the toxic stuff now. good. i understand they want to keep their modding as hands-off as possible and let the meme do most of the policing itself, but that's obviously failing in this instance. and threads that are created solely to make a racist point have every reason to be deleted.

sadly the first instance is from the

doctorwho comm, and i doubt anyone there gives a shit. i'm not going to become a member just so i can leave a comment saying, "dude. you're being racist." to some asshole who isn't going to listen to me in the first place.

I'm so glad that I've been way too busy to see what's up in those quarters lately. I might have popped a blood vessel or two.

aneurisms: fandom should not be giving us them.

Meanwhile, to bring the tone down because that's what I do, I just discovered another way Will Smith is HOTTER THAN THE SUN to me. We just watched this clip: Boom Goes The Dynamite (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W45DRy7M1no) of the worst sportscaster ever, I feel sorry for the dude, but at 2:30 he utters that phrase and it's awesome. Anyway, THEN Will Smith is at the Oscars presenting and references it (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HpLZ0mvMYlA) and I always thought I could not love Will Smith more, and then it turns out he's a nerd who knows YouTube memes.

In other news, you rock, as always, and I haven't even touched any of those threads on the meme in the last two days or so, because I just cannot deal.

ahahaha those clips were great! no way did that bring the tone down, my friend (how do you get lower than blatant racism anyway? -- no wait, don't answer that), you brought it up with WIN, and sexy will smith. a good strategy. :D

..That Will Smith clip is THE WIN. *dies laughing*

Oh, christ on a pogo stick. I hate this fandom sometimes.

i've been seeing this shit literally EVERYWHERE lately. it seems to be endemic to human existence, sadly.

Erm. This is going to sound very random since I just lurk here, but I was really glad you showed up in that meme discussion. I couldn't comment much since I was only sneaking peeks at the meme today, but you were a welcome voice of sanity in those threads and I wanted to say thank you.

Sadly, I think you might be right about the meme becoming 4chan. Which is a very, very sad thing to contemplate.

*goes back to lurking*

not random at all, dude, no worries. there's a reason i made a public post about it. i like when anonymity is fun, but this is the kind of situation where it only adds to the problem, because no one can be held accountable for their asinine words, and the people who are speaking up disappear as soon as the thread collapses. thanks for the kind words; i'm sure everyone who was trying to counter the racism over there would be glad to know that there were readers who appreciated their efforts, even if they weren't able to jump in at the time due to circumstances. i know if this had happened different day i could have missed it all cos i would have been working

I get the point of having an anonymous meme - it's helpful for getting some of the fandom baggage out of the way - but there'll always be someone out there who uses that anonymity to say things that they'd get rightly called on anywhere else. And there's no way to make them go away permanently.

?view=flat is at once a blessing and a curse; it means you get to read every single ugly remark, but it also means the people speaking up against the fail don't get lost in an uncollapsed thread. I'm still not sure if I want to go back to viewing the meme normally or not.

Sadly, I think you might be right about the meme becoming 4chan.

He is right. It's morphing into /b/ and it's so not pretty. Part of why I left.

Of all the parts of 4chan it could turn into? :( At least the placeholder image means it's a lot harder to post shocker images and the like.

I've stuck with it because it occasionally rewards me - even the last post had a few fun threads buried amongst the whining and fail. But the number of trolls hijacking racism, classism, sexism, everything to rile up anons (at least I hope they're trolls) has steadily gone up, and I just don't know if I want to bother anymore.

Why do people still bother with this fandom again?

because there are lots of good people in it as well as asshats? because if i wasn't in it i wouldn't have met you and then i wouldn't have been able to be friends with you and then i would never have the chance to eat those cookies and cream cupcakes that i am totally going to nom on when i visit youse.

also because i love the TARDIS.

"because there are lots of good people in it as well as asshats?"

You're sure that's not just an urban legend at this point?

"because if i wasn't in it i wouldn't have met you and then i wouldn't have been able to be friends with you and then i would never have the chance to eat those cookies and cream cupcakes that i am totally going to nom on when i visit youse."

:-D Yeah, but you're getting those anyway even if you suddenly renounce DW for Animaniacs slash or something. Actually, especially if you do that. *stocks up on Newman-O's for the frosting*

"also because i love the TARDIS."

That silly Twitter Stand RPG is threatening to become my new fandom with undue speed. I will save you, Nadine Cross!

You're sure that's not just an urban legend at this point?

i've met cool peoples online and also at chicago TARDIS and made new friends both ways. so if it's an urban legend then it must one of the ones that is SECRETLY TRUE, like crocodiles in the sewer in NY. or maybe i am a fictional construct. that would simplfy some things yet complicate others. hmmm.

Yeah, but you're getting those anyway even if you suddenly renounce DW for Animaniacs slash or something.

i can't think of slash for animaniacs that doesn't involve incest, so i think i'm going to stay weeeeeeeeell away from that one. although there was that one episode wher jimmy cagney was their "special friend"... NO!

I will save you, Nadine Cross!

awwwwwe. i would check it out but i've never read or seen the stand so i think i'd be a little lost.

Speaking of: SJA seems to come straight out of the 70s in its terrifying dystopian vision of a world where only people with jolly posh accents are left alive.

Really,

thehornedgod? When did you turn into the anonmeme's class troll?

Maybe he's been the class troll the whole time. I'm suspicious of people who say they don't visit the meme at all.

*ceases to thread-jack*

Possibly. He also once described Boris Johnson to me as doing a Four impression, which is another one of the troll's Things, not to mention a quite bizarre statement. I mean, there's the studied poshness of a working class actor who has learned RP, and then there's the lazy poshness of Johnson, and they sound quite different to my ear.

I hadn't seen that comment, but...ew. Yeah, I've never heard Johnson speak, but a lot of the lead actors in 70s Who spoke with Cockney or Estuary accents naturally; I can't imagine that sounds the same as someone who speaks RP all on their own.

Here is the context. I bailed out of the thread because obviously I was dealing with someone who had a completely different perception of reality to me.

a lot of the lead actors in 70s Who spoke with Cockney or Estuary accents naturally...

Exactly; it was how they got work. Not to mention the BBC's culture at the time was strongly biased against regional accents.

Complaining that Tom Baker, a man with a working class Catholic-Jewish background who was working as labourer to pay the bills, is "posh" involves a very reductive understanding of class. Even the Hon. Lalla Ward used to get pissy in interviews and point out that her parents earned wages and paid taxes.

It physically pains me that I cannot reach through the screen and add a full stop somewhere in that second sentence.

I can understand wanting to move away from BBC English (sort of; being of untuned American ears my understanding is mostly theoretical), but arguing that Tom Baker's Doctor is a parody of a politician who wouldn't be in power for another twenty-five-ish years is...odd, to say the least. And accents can be learned and unlearned, even as adults; it'd be one of the more unreliable indicators of class, especially for someone who *had* to assume another accent.

And accents can be learned and unlearned...

My day-to-day accent says, "Hello, I was educated at one of Brisbane's more expensive private schools". But that's purely because my parents have southern accents and I'm quite pedantic in my speech. Purely as a means of judging class ... no.

the arguments are so precisely the same i just assumed after i read that that i now knew who the classism on SJA troll was.

Oh, wow. I didn't have a clue about that, but then I do my best to ignore both Horned God and the classism troll. Hrm.

(I wish I had more time to spam the meme with positive stuff this weekend. That 4chan thing you said was very to the point.)

someone else on the meme brought up the 4chan comparison in a now thankfully deleted thread, so i can't take credit for that. but i do agree, even with my limited experience with 4chan. it's getting... not good.

the classism troll is very awful because they're co-opting an issue that's quite important to the main show but pretending it has no basis there. it's very annoying. sry but SJA's middle-class atmosphere is a hundred times better than making rose "better" than her worker class surroundings. ugh.

WTF?

Don't ask me, I thought the kids of SJA sounded neutrally middle class, and Lis Sladen's vowels are a lot flatter now than they were in the '70s.

i do understand not thinking that middle class is neutral, since i don't, but i also don't think SJA is a seething bed of classism. it is fairly middle class in that it doesn't address class issues much, but it also doesn't fall into the same classist traps that new who has been guilty of, plus it avoids most of the racism and sexism. i think it's doing a good job, on the whole.

Well this is nice to wake up to *facepalm*

I've given up hope on the anonmeme since... Well, since it was created, really, because I never really had any hope about it in the first place. Anonmemes are bound to go that way anyway... But it's always disapointing to see to what depths it can sink.

*munches furiously on her cereals*

too bad the first quote comes from a regular comm with the poster's name attached. *sigh*

the anonmeme is problematic in many ways, but for most of its life stuff like this was shut down really fast. which has not been happening recently. trolls are co-opting issues and making it a pain in the ass to read any thread, let alone contribute positively. very lame.

*wants cereals to nom*

Oh, the old "I'm not racist, I just won't accept a non-Caucasian" argument. Right up there with great works of consistent internal logic such as "the Government should stay out of people's private lives, except for regulating who they can marry and what health services they get." Although I will say that the OP is right that it's not "any latent racist views." That's the very definition of a blatant racist view.

As for the second quote, wow, what a sense of entitlement. It's not just enough they have to be the right race, they have to be sexually attractive too. Because the world owes the OP eye candy! Racism and objectivism: two great bigotries that apparently go great together.

I'm a member

doctorwho, although it's not in my reading filter. I wonder if it's worth bothering to comment or if it would be just shouting in the wind.

PS and off topic - congrats on the

calufrax rec!

That's the very definition of a blatant racist view.

my thoughts exactly.

As for the second quote, wow, what a sense of entitlement.

the poster later clarified that she was asian, and that she found black women attractive, so her statement obviously wasn't racist. whut? so you're only saying that half the black population of the entire world is intrinsically unattractive, not all of them, so it's not racist. okay.

later, though, she wrote a comment saying maybe it had been racist and since she'd been hurt by racism herself it was scary to think that maybe she could be racist too and seemed generally like she might have actually been thinking about the conversation. this was part of a thread that's since been deleted. but yay.

re: rec: i was recced once when calufrax started but that was a while ago now. that's two thirds of my posted stories covered, hurrah. the last one is so not worth reccing so i'm quite satisfied.

whut? so you're only saying that half the black population of the entire world is intrinsically unattractive, not all of them, so it's not racist.

O.o Or possibly *facepalm*

she might have actually been thinking about the conversation

I hope she takes it one step further and not only thinks twice about racism but about demanding that everyone she sees on TV be judged solely on her sexual attraction. One likes to think that acting skills and interesting characters would also play a part.

that's two thirds of my posted stories covered, hurrah

Huzzah!

but about demanding that everyone she sees on TV be judged solely on her sexual attraction.

well, i understand wanting to have a fanciable doctor because i quite like that myself, but of course the fanciability comes from how well the actor plays the character, for me. let's face it, david tennant looks a bit like a weasel with a lazy eye, but once he started getting into the character i was like, "actually, that lazy eye is pretty charming...."

Huzzah!

now i just need to finish a few of my many many WIPs. and other projects. erm.

but of course the fanciability comes from how well the actor plays the character, for me

Not just for you. Julius Carry as a guy didn't do all that much for me, but Lord Bowler knocked my knees out.

Whut you said. *nodnod*

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the failening

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