Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
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User ID: 297
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
3d ago
I have had more interaction than most people with non-native English speakers, including as a teacher. There are many second language learners who do in fact achieve native proficiency, often with a greater understanding of grammar and vocabulary than the average native because they have studied it so intensively.
You (and Hlynka) are the only ones who ever referred to him as "white trash." No one else gave a fuck about his background. He had a massive chip on his shoulder about being "not like the rest of you" when we're all just names on a screen here. No one is hearing your diction or your accent and concluding "white trash," nor does being a veteran, working class, or living in a red state make you unique or special.
Your accusation that we only judged his dig at @self_made_human as racist because we're a bunch of latte-sipping Blue tribers who don't know how Real Americans talk is pestiferous bullshit.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
3d ago
Right, the reason for a mirror scene is obvious. It's just become such a cliche at this point, it's like "It was a dark and stormy night."
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
3d ago
but from my memory it was mostly your fault.
Your memory is wrong. Not even a little bit wrong, but "the-sun-orbits-the-Earth-and-the-sky-is-orange" wrong. So wrong that you now make me suspect who you are an alt of (I have known you're an alt for a while).
Yes, there were a lot of posters who didn't like Hlynka because of his "style." But this is true of many regulars. No one was "classist" against him. The board, and the mod team, may lean heavily Blue techie, but it's not exclusively that by any means.
Making racist comments will almost always get modded. And Hlynka's comment was not an inoffensive suggestion that @self_made_human might have misunderstood something because "English is his second language" - he knew damn well smh was at least as literate in English as he was. It was a cheap dig because he had a long-standing animus against him.
Hlynka wasn't banned for that comment, he didn't get modded because @2rafa complained about it, and the mods did not react to @2rafa's complaint because we're all dudes defending milady's delicate sensibilities. @2rafa does not do anything "in association" with the mods - she is not part of the mod team, has never petitioned us for anything in particular, and we do not give her opinion more weight than any other long-time (admittedly, well-regarded) poster.
I do recall that Hlynka had a particular dislike of @2rafa, though, so it's very odd that you would be conjuring some conspiracy between us against him....
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
3d ago
I don’t recall who it was in science fiction, but it might have been Phillip Jose Farmer; someone who had been criticized for their inability to write female characters.
There have been many.
Isaac Asimov did kind of write women as basically alien creatures who exist only as sexual distractions for men (Susan Calvin being a notable exception), but, he was an uber-nerd who got started writing in the 1930s. Women probably were distracting alien creatures to him. And to be honest, I always thought Asimov just sucked at characterization in general. His characters are mostly hooks to hang a plot on.
Heinlein, of course, wrote uber-competent characters of both sexes, but his women were usually sexual libertines, and coincidentally, hot, young, nubile, and inexplicably attracted to potato-shaped older men who might happen to resemble a middle-aged SF author.
Those two archetypes, in various forms, are what you find in most early SF, and that's what grinds most feminist readers' gears: women are, in one form or another, basically male fantasies and sex objects. But most of those early SF writers were writing women in the roles that actually existed for women at the time. Some created women who could be smart and brave and actually do things, many just put women in the "wife/sister/girlfriend" role.
(Edgar Rice Burroughs' women were almost exclusively damsels in distress and/or objects of veneration. Robert E. Howard actually wrote female warriors like Belit and Red Nails. H.P. Lovecraft was probably more scared of women than he was of brown people and Shoggoths.)
Modern feminist critique mostly strikes me as bad faith (they will go through a book, analyzing an assortment of characters, and conclude that an author is misogynistic because his female characters have too much romantic attention put on them, or don't have enough to do, or have to be rescued by a man, or fulfill a "gendered role" or whatever). In some cases the observations are actually correct (yes, all the women are romantic interests and are not the action heroes the men are), but that is not necessarily a bad (or unrealistic) thing unless, well, you're a feminist reader who demands all stories give "equal representation" no matter how it distorts the story. But I can see how it would be kind of annoying to read book after book where men are the interesting characters and heroes who do things while women are just their love interests; better authors, even ones who aren't trying to be "feminist," can still make the female characters interesting. Less good authors just make them decoration. But you are not wrong that bad female characterization is usually reflective of an author who's just bad at characterization in general. (A lot of early, and contemporary(!), authors write great ideas, great plots, but cardboard characters.)
Ironically, one popular author often praised highly for his female characters is Brandon Sanderson. It's true his female characters are usually interesting, smart, brave bad-asses who still remain feminine. (Don't forget, Sando is still a Mormon and that always shows around the edges.) But his female characters are also all the same character. He basically can only write one. (Okay, maybe two or three.)
So anyway, yes, the woman in the OP is fairly typical of feminist critics: it's not that any of the women are unrealistic or "bad" characters. It's that they aren't checking her boxes and measuring up against men in the way she thinks they should. I don't know how often women actually note "perky tits" on themselves or other women, but the meme on the Internet is "breasting boobily," which is basically about male authors who spend too much time emphasizing a woman's appearance (and especially her breasts) in every scene, having her examine herself in a mirror (so the author can describe her perky tits), etc. This sometimes happens, and sometimes you do get the impression the author is infatuated with his own character, but now it's like a lot of writing memes, where it's a pattern you sometimes see but the mere existence of it in a scene is not, contrary to lots of bad writing advice, "bad writing."
(I mean, if you start the book with your character waking up from a dream, or the first thing the female character does is check herself out in the mirror, I probably am going to roll my eyes hard.)
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
3d ago
FWIW, we actually offered Hlynka the opportunity to be unbanned if he'd just promise to stop being a dick. We put it more nicely than that, and didn't demand he make a public apology.
His response was a fuck you, I didn't do anything wrong, and to start spinning up alts.
I can't say I would miss Dase as much. George is right that he just fundamentally despises anyone who disagrees with him. But I am sorry when interesting posters flame out.
We mods are discussing it, and while tempban is a possibility, it does get pretty tiresome tempbanning over and over someone who makes it clear he thinks an expectation of civility is a joke for him to wipe his feet on.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
5d ago
I sympathize. I worry about this myself. Some of our most interesting posters are, well, assholes. And when we ban someone for being an asshole once too often, we lose an interesting poster.
(Sometimes. Sometimes we just lose an asshole.)
The problem is the same problem we had with Hlynka: someone who decides he's just not going to follow the rules presents us with a dilemma. We can treat him like we'd treat anyone else who refuses to follow the rules, or we can decide the rules don't apply to some people.
Personally, I dislike the notion of a tiered system where some posters earn the right to be assholes because their AAQCs are so valuable. But I can see an argument for it. Maybe we decide, "Okay, fine, we have to give Dase a timeout every time he has a crash-out, but we'll never ban him because his AI posts are so interesting." And we bring back Hlynka and just give him a timeout every time he launches a diatribe against one of his enemies.
It's an option.
But please keep in mind that you are asking us to do more work (babysitting incorrigible assholes), and also requiring us to field even more accusations of unfair and discriminatory treatment (not everyone loves Hlynka and Dase, and we will get people saying "How come they get to snarl and rage at people but this poster I like didn't get immunity?").
Also worth noting that Dase himself has rejected the idea that he should be treated differently because of his emeritus status. So it would be an amusing bit of irony to say "Well, we're not going to ban you after all, so there!"
No, I am not. I have read many words by smh and by Hlynka, and while I won't judge their relative literacy or education levels (that would be "classist," wouldn't it?) it's very clear smh has perfect command of the English language, and Hlynka knew that. In other words, he was lying when he said he thought there was a communication failure because smh spoke "Indian." He had been on the forum, reading smh, for years. We're not talking about some ESL learner who still misspells words or uses foreign grammatical constructions. I am not saying this to defend @self_made_human (whom I do blame for being too AI-brain-rotted lately), but to refute your disingenuous point that Hlynka only said something that was a plain, truthful observation and got called "racist" because we're a bunch of redneck-haters here. No. That is not true, Hlynka knew it was not true, and you know it is not true.
He wasn't banned because of classism, and I don't care if he's a sad about feeling "left out" - all he had to do was stop being a dick to the people he wanted to "leave out."
Enough with this nonsense.
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