The Internet Judgement Machine

Remember this Reddit news item, wherein a bunch of people pushed their morality on someone?

At one point Mori asked “do you think the Internet should perch like an angel of conscience on your shoulder?” My response is — sure, why not? The internet is just other people…

- Noah Berlatsky

To which I noted,

I in no way want to get comfortable with the suggestion that listening to what other people claim to think is “the right thing” on an Internet forum necessarily bears the slightest resemblance to the best course of action.

Well, now we have a real crime for Reddit to react to, and the “mainstream press” like The Atlantic are gleefully skewering it for its reaction:

The amateur investigators from the site — having served as a kind of unofficial proving ground for theories that made their way to the mainstream media, jumping on the clear photo, despite the Post story that had also spread on Reddit — were tying the FBI photos to a 22-year-old Brown student and this ABC News report about his having gone missing last month. There was pushback, even on Reddit — “Leave the missing guy alone” — but it was too late; the trolls on Reddit had fed an army of all-nighter trolls in the media.

Indeed the Internet is just other people – and this is what other people do. They are undisciplined, they jump on a quick solution to a complex social problem, and they find it easy to blame those who stick out – those not like them – because it feels right.  By and large, people do not serve the truth because it is hard to serve the truth.  They would much rather believe that the truth exists to serve them.

If fifty million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing. – Anatole France

For those who were not misled by the hoopla, I applaud you.

And for those of you affected by the bombing, particularly those who lost friends and loved ones, you have my deepest sympathies.

Must

“Don’t tell me what I must do. The only things I must do are pay my taxes and die.” – Popular twist on Ben Franklin quote

It’s tax day in the USA, and when matters of money come up, the international gripe machine swivels its cyclopean head to focus on those richer than us.  For the delectation of the howling masses, CNN trots out this predictable analysis of Mark Zuckerberg’s fortune, complete with the line “he’ll never have to pay taxes again.”

What? Unfair! We the people, innately born with virtue and made equal by dint of the fact that This Is America, squat in our upside-down condos and lament our fortune.  You know what would really make us feel better? Improving our lives? No; that can wait – what we really want to get into is negativity about one of those who succeeded. Because nothing says ‘a better future’ like denying that it’s possible for people to make it here in the now.

Fantasy Slut League, and Cherry Picking Results

Liz Crocker’s article at The Daily Beast decries Piedmont High’s Fantasy Slut League as “the newest callous form of misogyny.” The one sentence excerpted from the article and set aside in huge print reads, “The sexual braggadocio inherent in the league is more common than the media are reporting.”

All true, and all good and well. But the real news in the article comes in its last paragraph, hidden away from all but the most determined readers:

- Many students on the “fantasy slut league” list, while not necessarily approving of the name, did not mind being placed on a list of sexually desirable dates.  (See this articulate and nuanced letter by a female PHS senior on why the “moral panic” response is not constructive.) This doesn’t make things okay for those who were not okay with it, but it does mean the league was far from a unilateral imposition on a populace that uniformly resented it. In short, FSL was not tyranny; it was fashion.

- Gossip, while it can be used to destroy people via perceived social value, is hardly the exclusive purview of men. Considering the FSL a gossip aggregator (as the female student urges) rather than a command-and-control center greatly alters the paradigm in which all this sex is happening. (One might argue the real problem here is the obsession with what other people think about your own life, sexual or otherwise, but that is a topic for another post.)

- Karen Owen’s “thesis” equally treated men like disposable sex objects. It, too, got a tremendous amount of attention, both negative and positive. Some argued that if this was how she discovered and explored her own sexuality, who were we to judge her for it? By and large, the media have not given similarly balanced coverage of the boys who attempted to “gamify” human sexuality in order to better make sense of it.  If the spirit in which she made the document matters, then so too should the spirit in which the boys made their document, and recognition of that that is precisely why the PHS senior goes into such an explanation of the intended use of Fantasy Slut League. I would not be surprised if, from their perspective, it was a clumsy attempt to combine two things they love (gaming and sex.) While that does not make it a great thing, it also does not make it a twisted conspiracy to sexually enslave women.

- Modern women typically have a high degree of control over their own sexuality (at least, modern women with the status of PHS students or Duke students – the story is different for women in a place like rural India) and attempts to paint them all as the hapless victims of male lust are arguably as divorced from reality as the idea of a male-run Fantasy Sex League itself. Insisting that a woman is a victim despite her knowing otherwise is incredibly disenfranchising.

I take issue with the way the email attempts to speak for girls just like me. I know that my name has been mentioned on the FSL page. It makes me uncomfortable, but it does not make me a “victim,” as the email labels me. I am not a victim because I know what FSL truly is. It is not a rape group, as the email, perhaps inadvertently, implies; it is a gossip page where Varsity Footballers talk about what happened last weekend and “who got with who.” I do not appreciate being labeled a “victim” by an administration that is not in possession or understanding of the facts.

All this, and reporters everywhere still took it upon themselves to speak for girls just like her.

To me, the takeaway is that the situation for women continues to improve.  Fifty years ago, while gaming culture did not exist, men bragging about their sexual exploits was so common and accepted that it did not occasion comment.  Five hundred years ago, men taking sexual advantage of the women associated with defeated armies was similarly common and accepted (rape was, literally, part of the spoils of war.) Now, in 2012-2013, women are able to calmly make decisions about their sexual future and intelligently use their status to their advantage. It would be unmistakably a step backwards to say the only legitimate response they can have to boys making lists is moral outrage, and it is heartening to see that the women of PHS, if one is any indication, know better.

A Gentle Reminder

Here at The Moritheil Review, our policy is to only comment and inform on public drama. Occasionally it happens that buyer’s remorse sinks in, and people who at first wanted to go public later want their personal drama removed.  While we are under absolutely no obligation to do so for matters already public (and the tweets are typically linked, to demonstrate that TMR has faithfully represented their substance), the purpose of TMR is not to cause people anguish.

If you are undergoing some drama and would like to avoid being featured in TMR or indeed any twitter/drama aggregator or gossip site, we highly recommend you switch your preferences to Protected Posting.  In general, tweeting or blogging something publicly will be taken as indicating that you want as many people in the world as possible to see your words, as that is the explicit purpose of non-private tweets/blog posts.

Thank you for reading, and please continue to enjoy The Moritheil Review – bringing you the dorama™.

Return to form: luneru vs dogrunes

It’s been a while since TMR reported any twitter dorama, so a post on it might well be called a return to form.  Commentary after the text dump.

 

Hat tip to @moronsister, and trigger warning: language.

 I watched someone spiral into madness on twitter last night. Pretty entertaining and yet horrifying and embarrassing. More con than pro

Oppai Taisen: The War Continues

After a break in the fighting, the Breast Wars have seen another fight recently: Myst1ord and Omonomono clashed over their differing opinions on form-fitting clothing for women in anime.

 

Omonomono’s points:

- Art is unrealistic; this does not make it unenjoyable

- This is a trend that continues across multiple genres, from ancient Egyptian art to modern superflat

Myst1ord’s points:

- Verisimilitude is important to creating enjoyable art

- Purple hair, nekomimi etc. do not break suspension of disbelief and therefore there is no inconsistency in railing against excessively unrealistic or caricaturized art, but not railing against these things.

Drmchsr0′s point:

- Anime girls are often dressed to evoke the virgin/whore dichotomy – and not in a constructive, edifying manner.

The Basis of Morality

Noah (@hoodedu) linked me to his thoughts on morality.  Thanks, Noah. Twitter is indeed a very awkward platform for nuance.

This discussion started with reference to the loss of a Neil Gaiman script for Dr. Who.  Thousands of users posted on reddit to pressure the person who found it (or rather, their roommate) to “do the right thing,” and the subsequent trumpeting by some that this somehow “vindicated” the moral authority of the Internet was sickening.  Let me be clear – I do think that in this case returning the item happened to be the right thing to do. But that is a happy coincidence.  I in no way want to get comfortable with the suggestion that listening to what other people claim to think is “the right thing” on an Internet forum necessarily bears the slightest resemblance to the best course of action.  I find equating the right thing to do and the popular thing to do to be morally dangerous. (Cf. slavery, the oppression of minority religions and minority ethnicities, violent homophobia, the cutting of the rose, etc. – all popularly accepted by society for thousands of years, but to me, morally unacceptable.)

If fifty million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing. – Anatole France

Now, with respect to the comments at Noah’s site:

Peter is right in that my statement is not about the generation of moral principles but rather in the idea that one should not ascribe a higher moral authority to the government, to the state, to the corporation, to a board of directors, or indeed to any man-made amalgamation of individual moral actors. Having numbers does not make them automatically more morally correct than an individual making a moral decision. (The critique of modern law as judicial shamanism, for instance, is a structural observation based upon how the ritual of law is constructed around making it appear more impressive, as if that spectacle makes it more morally correct.)

If we say that the state does not properly have the authority to tell you which god to worship, then I take a half-step further and posit that neither does it have the right to dictate your ideals, to tell you good or evil. Of necessity, it makes purely practical judgements like, “People are not permitted to steal things or we will lock them up,” which are to some degree useful for the functioning of society, but we should not confuse them with moral judgements.

Peter also says,

We simply try to muddle through, creating the best world we can — deploying not principles, but what Charles Taylor called “inspired adhoccery.”

I would restate Peter’s “ad hoc” statements thus: there exists a moral axis and a pragmatic axis, and as moral agents we are perpetually brokering an uneasy peace between the two. To be perfectly moral would require infinite resources, or at least the ability to act as if there were infinite resources – a disregard for the pragmatic side of things. To be perfectly pragmatic would require infinite moral flexibility, or effectively an outright lack of morality.  (This level of abstraction, incidentally, derives from the “postmodern” half of my explanation of my stance as “postmodernist-existentialist.”  Peter notes correctly that I differ from Sartre in at least one significant place despite calling my reasoning existentialist.  I believe even Sartre used meta-level principles for moral reasoning in No Exit, but that is a discussion for another time.) I submit that to not perfectly cleave to abstract principles is a different order of things from never attempting to stick to principles in the first place.  That, I believe, is where the real danger of doing what is most comfortable rather than what is moral lies.  Call it a throwback to my days in science: that which is never measured is never properly observed, and that which is not observed, we cannot really make clear statements about. How can you monitor your own moral progress without having some kind of measure?

In the end I suspect my differences with Noah might be theological more than descriptive: is there such a thing as morality, independent of social feedback and pragmatic goals? I say yes, as long as we believe and set it apart; law, for instance, is not morality. Noah, if I read him correctly above, says no. If you don’t allow that morality exists as a separate conceptual thing, then perhaps the distinctions I am drawing become meaningless.

I believe they have meaning, though.

Karaoke: An Historical Record

On this day, 1 year ago, SCCSAV conducted an online karaoke session.  No records are known to have been released to the public . . . until now.

1. bythebooks – Broken Wings : Tomoko Tane (Trinity Blood ED)
2. Orange – Oath Sign : Lisa (Fate/Zero)
3. bythebooks – Feel So Good : Supercell
4. Mystlord – Katamari on the Rocks – Katamari Damacy
5. sebz – Karakuri *insert Buddhist swastika* Burst : Kagamine Rin and Len
6. sebz – Sweet Drops – PUFFY (Usagi Drop OP)
7. Orange – Title Nante Jibun de Kangaenasai na : Miyuki Sawashiro (Arakawa UTB)
8. bythebooks & Razzyness(‘s recording) – Cendrillon : MikuXKaito
9. Jun – Romeo and Cinderella (Vocaloid)
10. Mystlord – Hanaji : Kobayashi Yuu (Maria Holic OP)
11. sebz – Rin Len Romantic Night : Kagamine Rin and Len
12. Anya – Kimi no Naka no Eiyuu – Minami Kuribayashi (Gundam AGE ED)
13. bythebooks – Meltdown : Asami Shimoda
14. Orange – Why Was This Happening : Hatsune Miku
15. Caraniel – Lonely in Gorgeous – Tommy February6 (Paradise Kiss OP)
16. Jun – Blue (Vocaloid; Yuyoyuppe, Draw the Emotional)
17. Mystlord – Paradise Lost – Minorin~~ (Ga-Rei Zero OP)
18. sebz – Panda Hero : GUMI
19. Anya – The Eternal Soldiers – Loudness (MazinKAISER SKL OP)
20. sebz – Bye Bye (Kimi to Boku OP) : 7!!
21. bythebooks – Light My Fire : KOTOKO (Shana III OP)
22. Caraniel – We Fight Together – Namie Amuro (One Piece OP14)
23. Mau – Ryu – Sound Holic (Touhou/ Youmu’s Theme)
24. bobbierob – Modokashii Sekai no Ue de – Makino Yui (Welcome to the NHK ED)
25. Starburst – Hana No Iro -Nano.RIPE
26. Mystlord – Sousei no Aquarion (Sousei no Aquarion OP)
27. Anya – Core Pride[UVERworld & In My World [Rookie Is Punk’d] (Ao no Exorcist OPs)
28. bythebooks & Hyadain – Hyadain no Kakakatakataomoi-C (Nichijou OP)
29. bobbierob – Watashi no Koi wa Hotch-Kiss – HTT (K-ON INS)
30. Mau – Border of My Life – Sound Holic (Touhou/ Yuyuko’s Theme)
31. Caraniel – Toki ni Ai wa – Okui Masami (Revolutionary Girl Utena Movie)
32. Anya – Gecchuu! Rabu Rabu?! – Mayumi Gojo (Futari wa Pretty Cure ED)
33. bobbierob – Ready!! – 765Pro Allstars (Idolm@ster OP)
34. Mystlord – Zzz – Sayaka Sasaki (Nichijou ED1)
35. bythebooks – Memoria : Aoi Eir (Fate/Zero ED)
36. bobbierob – Tsubasa wo Kudasai – HTT (K-ON INS)
37. Anya – Detarame na Zanzou – Gran Rodeo (Blassreiter OP1)
38. Mystlord – Neko Miko Reimu
39. bythebooks – Marisa Stole the Precious Thing
40. Anya – Touhou Sweets
41. Moritheil – Tomorrow – Shimokawa Mikuni (Full Metal Panic OP)
42. Anya – Kimi ni Fuku Kaze – Shimokawa Mikuni (Full Metal Panic Fumoffu! ED)

Woohoo karaoke!~☆ ♪~(´ε｀ )

On Women, Wonder and Being Super

“If you want to date a queen, you have to be a king.” – Conventional wisdom

Superman’s long-standing relationship with Lois Lane was recently dissolved in the annals of DC Comics.  Instead, his new designated partner is someone who is more like him: also a superhero, also able to defy conventional physical limitations.  They chose to explore Wonder Woman as a partner for the Man of Steel.

On the surface, that doesn’t seem so bad.  While yes, they are messing with a classic pairing, perhaps it’s time to examine the flawed assumptions that the classic supports: that women are weaker than men, that the man always saving the woman is a normal or even rejoiceable item, that Wonder Woman must be single as a feminist icon, even that a female reporter could date Superman and fail to suspect his real identity.  A number of those things limit feminism, and women.

However, that’s not how the masses have it.  Over at Ineffable Aether, the comments are piling up:

The “new” they chose disrespected and degraded two powerful women. It legitimized the idea that Diana exists not to have her own story but to be part of a man and pushed aside the most powerful civilian woman in the genre.
It confuses mr that you, of all people, don’t think that is condemnable. – Elle

Greg Rucka is quick to distance himself from the specific details of DC’s implementation of a new continuity – and I myself have to raise my eyebrows hearing about some of them – but the idea that Superman is with someone who is more like him, a partner in fighting the good fight, is not automatically objectionable to me.  I don’t see it as degrading or disrespectful to tell a different story here.  I understand that new Lois Lane is shown as a sexual creature, whereas the original 1930s characters were created in an earlier era, and not really sexual at all.  But the fact that this is automatically lamentable wins no points for consistency; whence cometh SlutWalk? Are we not pushing the idea that women are free to have as few or as many sexual partners as they choose?  How can we push that idea and simultaneously be squeamish about showing a sexually active woman in a work where men are shown to be equally sexually active?

Only if you define those two characters solely by their relationships. Wonder Woman is not disrespected or degraded by putting her into a relationship with Superman, just as she wouldn’t be is she was linked romantically with anyone.
However, if you’re worried that, by linking her romantically with Superman she will, by dint of Superman’s overwhelming status as “the” super-hero, come to be seen as an attachment to him rather than an important figure in her own right (“Superman’s Girl-Friend Wonder Woman,” as it were) you may have point, but only time will tell. – Gray

1.) Supporting the idea that Wonder Woman is a sex object and “sidekick” “girlfriend’ figure as opposed to a protagonist in her own story is a huge mistake that is going to be detrimental long term to the character in the WAY men perceive her going forward. There is a subset of male fans who have always viewed Wonder Woman as a sex object and attempted to re-purpose her for their own vision and use as opposed to honoring who she truly is and what she stands for. DC used to refuse to cater to those people because it was essential that DC upheld the line that Diana did not exist to belong to men because she wasn’t here for men or their gross sex fantasies about how hard she could “take it” during sex (gross btw)—she was here for women. DC has now given them permission to view her this way. – M.

So a subset of people with an irrational viewpoint (which sounds borderline fetishistic) is more important to you than all the people who have more reasonable takes on the story.  I mean, that appears to be what you’re saying – you’re not arguing about how most people take it, you’re saying “because these extremists believe X, and we’d only be encouraging them by doing Y, Y is verboten even if it wouldn’t send that message to most people.”

You can find anything on the Internet, so I would hardly take the fact that some extremist thinks something as proof that that thing is the new normal.  Now, if a year from now, the work has increased the number of people who think of Wonder Woman in a way that you find objectionable and harmful, then this argument may really be right. Until then – do you propose we let the extremists decide everything? That would be handing them power.

2.) A Superman story where Superman is not struggling in some form with his passion/lust/sexuality/love for the very flawed and mortal Lois Lane—whether she be his wife, his girlfriend, or simply the friend who sits next to him at his desk that he loves from afar— is not a story about Superman.
- M.

Really? I seem to recall similar situations in Twilight being condemned as “abstinence porn.”

Is a Superman story all about how a totally awesome guy has to content himself with a flawed woman?  Maybe in the past, that has occurred with some regularity.  But maybe, just maybe, switching Superman’s partner means that new stories can be written, stories in which the man doesn’t always happen to be the competent one and the woman doesn’t happen to be in need of rescuing all the time.  Maybe that’s not a bad thing.

Of Privilege and Meta-privilege

People talk a lot about privilege.  But is the ability to talk about privilege – that awareness, coupled with being in a societal position where one can get away with discussing privilege – itself a meta-level privilege?

Reddit exploded recently with comments about Shit Reddit Says (SRS), a subreddit that calls out redditors for making insensitive, normative statements.  Their usual M.O. is to flood the comment with extremely vituperative replies calling the poster hateful filth, or “cis scum.”  For those singled out after making careless remarks, the experience can be disorienting and bewildering.

Their defense for the whole, sawcasm discrimination don’t real thing is that without institutionalized discrimination you can’t have oppression. Which is fine, I understand that cracker is never ever going to have the same sting as the n word or whatever.

- yakityyakblah

The issue, of course, becomes “what is institutionalized?”  For those whose daily source of talk about non-business matters is a board on the Internet, or say, reddit, having an organized group of people jump on them to ruin their day can feel awfully like society is against them, even if it’s a trick of the light possible only in such a microcosm.  And yes, certainly, that won’t change the fact that if we have to pick one person to have sympathy for in this whole mess, it won’t be the person sitting in a 4 bedroom house with a platinum card.

But who says we can only pick one person to feel sorry for?

Just because you aren’t as bad as something else doesn’t mean you’re good. Hating any entire group based on superficial characteristics is wrong, fundamentally. Hate the system that gives them the privilege, hate those that use the privilege against you or refuse to acknowledge it, but don’t hate everyone.

I’d go a step further, actually, and say don’t hate those who use privilege or can’t see it: use their blindness.  Hate isn’t productive, and while productivity may seem to be a concept forced upon us by industrialization, it is useful to everyone.  I don’t hate the physically deficient, those incapable of performing tasks the rest of us take for granted. Why would I? Those kids have it rough.  I don’t hate the mentally deficient, those incapable of grasping the lessons schooling seeks to impart on us.  Why would I? They are stuck in a world they can’t understand, and offend us without realizing what they do.

Similarly, I don’t hate the morally deficient, those incapable of understanding that what they do is immoral.  Again . . . why would I? You can only ask someone, in all reasonableness, to go along with things when they see the reason for those things.  Otherwise you are simply resorting to force.

not to mention, using another person’s life as a weapon to punish someone for behavior you disapprove of is a pretty big dick move.

-dietotaku

Privilege discussions can veer into negativity and inescapability.  Rather than focus on what you don’t have that others do, sometimes – for the sake of your own sanity and ability to get things done – it is important on what you do have that others don’t. I’m not saying anything about the nature of class warfare or privilege denial.  I’m only asking – what do you get out of spending time on it?  I’ve seen some brilliant people fall to despair and inaction due to obsessing over the map rather than crossing the map. And if you believe that you are oppressed, and allow it to cripple you – doesn’t your awareness become their tool? Aren’t they then using it to further your oppression?

“Life is 10% of what happens to you, and 90% of how you react to it” said people in first world nations

- @_loiseau_de_feu