“Arthur Conan Doyle was knighted, but not for the merits of Sherlock Holmes. The writer was invited to join the ranks of the nobility as thanks for the propaganda he wrote for the imperial cause.
One of his heroes was Robert Baden-Powell, the founder of the Boy Scouts. They met while fighting savages in Africa:
‘There was always something of the sportsman in his keen appreciation of war,’ Sir Arthur said.
Gifted in the art of following the tracks of others and erasing his own, Baden-Powell was a great success at the sport of hunting lions, boars, deer, Zulus, Ashantis, and Ndebeles.
Against the Ndebeles, he fought a rough battle in southern Africa.
Two hundred and nine blacks and one Englishman died.
The colonel took as a souvenir the horn the enemy blew to sound the alarm. And that spiral-shaped horn from a kudu antelope was incorporated into Boy Scout ritual as the symbol of boys who love nature.”
Eduardo Galeano in Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone
In prime of Youth what Funny Tricks
Are often play’d by either Sex!
The Tales they’ve heard their Nurses say
They put in Practice Day by Day.
Forbear dear Girls! For Pity’s sake
Have Mercy on a Sleeping Rake!
As in the Bowl his Hand you’ve got,
You’ll make him soon do –– You know what.
Scalzi’s prideless assessment of his video-game-difficulty metaphor as ‘facile’ in light of life experiences like this one, and his call for subtlety and empathy when reaching out to people, struck me as the best sort of humility. From experience, it’s too easy for dudes like me to treat their good politics the way Reddit treats atheism, i.e. like a cudgel.
I always ask my white dude interviewees to shout out some contemporaries we should check out, and Scalzi’s answers got cut for space. For the record, he named Nalo Hopkinson, N.K. Jemisin, and Cat Valente, and pointed out that both Valente and Jemisin have been enabled by social media to be loud and public about social justice issues, both inside and outside their fiction and irrespective of a publisher’s support. I’m gonna stick that trend story pitch in my back pocket.
And finally, we got a little more into it on comment moderation, which was interesting to me:
Do you find that the commenters are disproportionately straight white men – people who are sociologically conditioned to insert their opinion into a conversation?
Well, the site has 50,000 readers per day just as the natural population, and our regular commenters are a relatively diverse group. It is true, though, that left to their own devices, the loudest and most obnoxious people will crowd out reasonable discussion, or discussion from all points of view. Which is why I go out of my way, when someone’s being patently obnoxious, to take out what I call the Mallet of Loving Correction and get rid of them. You can’t have that back-and-forth if someone is threadcrapping.
Is good comment moderation an act of social justice?
It could be. I don’t look at it on such a grand scale. I want a multiplicity of voices, I want a space for people to discuss things, that they can be challenged and have heated responses, but at the end of the day, they can make themselves be heard. Does that relate to social justice? It does in that, hopefully, people feel like my site is a place where they can be heard. Being heard is an incredibly important thing. Now, the thing about moderation is that it requires a huge amount of time on somebody, which is why I think comment moderation is a bit of a lost art. I spent my whole day doing nothing but sitting on that thread, making sure it didn’t blow up.
Scalzi’s reticence to name the social justice element in the work he does to create a safe environment for conversation, coupled with his reticence to name the social justice element in writing sci-fi universes that are legitimately diverse, makes me think. Is there a need for a companion blog to Microaggressions — call it Microassertions, someplace where people can catalog the little things that made them feel more like a just society is on the horizon, to legitimize them as important? I think it could be a good thing. Someone who isn’t me, i.e. a straight white ablebodied cisgender man, should consider it.
“WELCOME TO CARRY ME HOME! WE ARE A REAL LIFE ROLEPLAY SET IN THE FICTIONAL TOWN OF AVALON, CONNECTICUT. FOUNDED IN 1858 BY FOUR FAMILIES, AVALON’S ORIGINAL PURPOSE WAS TO SERVE AS A COUNTRY CLUB FOR THE WEALTHY AND ELITE OF NEW YORK CITY. HOWEVER, AT THE TURN OF THE CENTURY, IT CHARTERED AS A TOWN. WITHIN WEEKS THE SMALL ELITIST COMMUNITY BLOSSOMED TO INCLUDE PEOPLE FROM ALL WALKS OF LIFE AND IT HAS KEPT GROWING SINCE THEN. PLEASE REGISTER WITH YOUR CHARACTER’S FIRST AND LAST NAME IN LOWERCASE.” This is how Oedipa Maas felt when she got a Google alert about W.A.S.T.E. a fictional character with her name on a ‘Shadowplay Topsite,’ huh?
Tonight Emily and I went to see David Rees discuss pencil-sharpening techniques at a bookstore in Berkeley. We volunteered to demonstrate an experimental technique in which Emily pretended to be a Toyota Corolla named Emily, and I pretended to drive her through a drivethrough while sharpening a pencil, and then I pretended to pretend to be an alien trying to pay for food in pencil shavings. (This is all per written instructions in Mr. Rees’ book.)
Anyway, it was great, and he sharpened my vintage Blackwing afterwards at a discounted rate. There was a ten-year-old sitting in front of us who asked a question whose answer required profanity, which was wonderful, and people around me kept murmuring in agreement with statements about pencils, which was also wonderful. Here is a bad photo of my post-performance graphitey hand with Mr. Rees in the background. And now, back to my life of deleting racist comments off of news stories about children.
sometimes i don’t think about this video for a few months and then i find it and watch the whole thing and i am happy i found it, but also kind of wish i could just forget about it forever.
I kind of like this c2005 self-portrait even though it’s objectively a pretty bad drawing. I lived outside of Boston for a very short time that seemed like a very long time.
