fanbun

Minecraft (2011)

"I Will Destroy You Now"

Stewie: Ok. I’m ready to marry you, now.

Brian: Wait. What? No, I’m your dad!

Stewie: Yes, you are. This is what’s happening.

I’ll be real, Anon: I have a hard time taking this ask seriously and I considered whether it might be best not to even engage with it. But I’m going to try my best to respond in good faith, on principle, because I do actually feel very strongly about this and the fact that this showed up in my inbox within minutes kinda validates the frustration I was expressing in the original post.

[CW for discussion of all sorts of triggery topics below]

Point #1: In the first place let me just say that it’s very revealing, as a general rule, when somebody makes what should by all rights be a pretty innocuous and easy-to-agree-with statement and people leap in to raise objections based on the most extreme outlier examples they can think of. It doesn’t necessarily tell you a lot about the topic at hand. It does tell you something about the respondents, and the motivations and fears (fear is definitely the operative word here) driving their responses. It almost always means there’s some kind of a slippery slope fallacy at work.

I’m pretty widely-traveled and I gotta say I’ve never seen anyone in a park wearing kink gear, unless by that you mean “some goth kids in eye makeup and leather collars.” I have likewise never in my entire life encountered the term “transage” in the wild, and when I google it the first result is an Urban Dictionary entry that says it was invented by right-wingers to mock and/or fearmonger about trans people, so. I feel like that illustrates how relevant your examples are to everyday life. 

There’s this widespread sentiment on Tumblr that just because certain non-normative behaviors - hyperfocusing on special interests, frank discussion of sexuality or mental health, writing kinky fanfic as a birthday present for a friend - are slightly more accepted here (emphasis on “slightly” because again, just look how common the should’ve-been-bullied-more backlash jokes are), those behaviors have become normal and accepted in society at large. This is comically untrue. Even something as tame as writing (totally non-kinky!) fanfic, or getting passionate about your interests to a degree that the average neurotypical person clocks as “weird,” is going to get you mocked - let alone something like, oh idk, admitting that you’re into furry porn. Being open about mental health or sexuality can and does get people fired or hurt or killed with distressing frequency.

So I gotta ask - do you really think that the Weirdos are in any danger of forgetting that they’re weirdos? And why is it so incredibly threatening to you that they might? Even in the rare cases when we’re talking about genuinely harmful as opposed to just “weird” or “annoying” or “cringey” behavior, why is labeling behavior as inappropriate so closely linked with bullying in your mind? Why did my post make you feel such a pressing need to defend the social value of shame? Can you actually cite your sources here, and do they actually say what you recall them saying? Was there more nuance to it? Was there bias? Did you feel the need to check before sending this ask? How do you define “full kink gear,” and how many times have you actually encountered people wearing it in your local park - or is that a hypothetical image that lives rent-free in your imagination, as a symbolic representation of some underlying anxiety? If people genuinely aren’t hurting anyone else, why is it so important for them to feel ashamed of themselves? What are you afraid of? And why does it feel like such an urgent threat that you couldn’t let my very straightforward “bullying is bad and jokes about it aren’t funny” post pass without well-actually-ing it?

Point #2: Let’s say for the sake of argument that we genuinely are discussing objectively harmful behavior here. (Though let’s be clear: usually people get bullied for being harmlessly weird, which is to say not conforming to social norms, which is frequently just another way to say queer or gnc or disabled or neurodivergent or fat or poor or non-white or absolutely anything else that’s vulnerable or marginalized.) There’s a difference between shame and shaming, which may seem like hairsplitting but is in fact a very important distinction imho. 

I’ve never been able to unsee that one post that defined shame as “a kind of moral dysphoria” - a recognition that the person you want to be and the reality of your present actions are out of alignment. I think it’s a good definition and it can certainly be a very painful experience. That doesn’t automatically make it bad. I’ve said many times that I think learning is often at least a little bit uncomfortable, and that trying to completely eliminate discomfort from our lives is a good way to stunt our moral and intellectual growth. In that sense, I agree with you that a little bit of shame can be a personal and societal good. But feeling bad because you’ve behaved badly and feeling bad because someone else deliberately set out to cause you pain are two very different experiences.

Radical opinion apparently but I don’t believe in hurting people to teach them a lesson. I don’t believe it’s moral and what’s more, I don’t believe it works. (And there’s a pile of research - on prisons, on child development, on animal behavior ffs - that backs me up on this.) The only lessons people learn from intentionally inflicted pain are about force and fear and power. About who has the power to hurt them with impunity, and how to hurt people with even less power than they have.

You’re making a HUGE leap from “labeling inappropriate behavior” to “shaming.” (“Inappropriate” is also doing a whole lot of rhetorical work here, but again, I’m trying to respond in good faith.) And regardless of how careful you were to draw a distinction between shaming and bullying...like I said, it’s extremely revealing that my post about the latter made you feel so defensive of the former.

Might labeling someone’s behavior as harmful cause them to feel shame? Sure, and I don’t think this is a bad thing. But shaming is something else entirely. The end goal of shaming isn’t to label a behavior as harmful, or explain why it’s harmful, or teach healthier ways to behave. The end goal of shaming is to create feelings of shame, on the logic that shame and fear are the best tools society has for enforcing good behavior. It’s a demonstration of communal power and - let’s just admit it - communal pleasure in exercising that power, by making examples of people who step out of line. And by its very nature, it almost only ever “works” (if you can call it that) against people who are already vulnerable. You can’t shame someone with sufficient power and connections into good behavior, because they have enough social clout to insulate them from the negative effects. (Frankly I think it’s pretty clear by now that many powerful and unscrupulous people don’t have any shame, or at least don’t feel shame about the same things that we think they should, and public disgust may have some value as a demonstration of solidarity with their victims but it sure as hell isn’t gonna convince them to quit harming others.) You can’t shame someone into good behavior at all if their bad behavior is widely accepted by society. And on the very rare occasion that you can change someone’s behavior via public shaming, you haven’t taught them to be a better person; you’ve taught them to be afraid of you. 

Like...I think your opinion is harmful! I disagree very strongly, and depending on how well I make my point and how susceptible you are to feeling badly about yourself because an internet stranger disapproves of your worldview, you might feel a twinge of shame. But I’m not trying to shame you; I’m trying to explain why I think you’re wrong and why I think it matters so much. And if you weren’t on anon and a bunch of other Tumblr users showed up in your inbox to harass and shame you for those opinions I HIGHLY doubt it would do anything to change your mind, and I definitely don’t think it would make Tumblr a better place, and I think that would be really shitty behavior on their part.

Shaming is a pretty effective tool for enforcing societal norms and power dynamics, including extremely unethical ones. It’s not a very effective tool for building healthier communities. 

Point #3: Be deeply wary of any argument that asks you to carve out specific exceptions for particular classes of people.

Here’s the thing: we’ve all heard this argument before. There’s always some group that’s unraveling the very fabric of society by not conforming to it. We hear all about the social value of shame whenever queer people have the temerity to not only exist, but to ~threaten family values~ by being joyful and unashamed of themselves in public. We hear all about the social value of shame anytime women fail to toe the patriarchal line. 

You’re telling me that shaming is a social tool to mark the limits of acceptable behavior and I’m going to assume you mean well. But I think you have to recognize that in practice, what that frequently means is that it’s a way of marking out the borders of societal protection - which is to say, a way of designating acceptable targets. 

Think of slut-shaming. How dare she wear those clothes, how dare she dance that way, how dare she get drunk, how dare she drink at all, how dare she want and enjoy sex, how dare she act in a way that even suggests she might - and if she did any of those things she deserved what she got, and probably wanted it anyway. Think of those awful infamous rape cases like Steubenville, where the sexual assault itself is followed up by relentless community-wide cyberbullying of the victim. It’s not just violence. It’s shame-as-violence, and violence-as-shame.

Shaming enforces the social status quo. Like I said above, it’s always most effective when it’s used by the powerful against the vulnerable. And that makes it extremely prone to being weaponized not to enforce good behavior, but to enable bad behavior by blaming and dehumanizing the victim. Almost nobody goes around claiming to support bullying or rape or any other kind of abuse. They find a reason to justify it to themselves just this once.

Bullying is wrong, but THOSE nerds are so anti-socially weird that it’s for their own good. Rape is wrong, but THAT slut was asking for it. (Or: rape is wrong, except when it happens to rapists in prison.) Calling people animals is wrong, but it’s okay if you’re talking about murderers. Slavery is wrong, except as punishment for a crime. Rounding people up and putting them in camps is wrong, unless it’s wartime and you’re afraid they might give information or supplies or moral support to the other side. Surely these people don’t really count, surely these people aren’t really human, surely we can make a special exception for them.

And yeah, occasionally - not often, but occasionally - the people everybody wants to make a human rights exception for genuinely have done harm. Because I grew up during The Bush Years and spent a truly unfortunate and formative percentage of my teenage life arguing with people I had previously respected about how torture is a moral atrocity, I know that the standard response here is that I must love terrorists/pedophiles/nazis/rapists/gang members/hypothetical kinksters exposing themselves in public parks/whoever the Bad Guys Du Jour are, and support their crimes, and wish them to continue! Because I don’t want them to face Consequences For Their Actions!

This is overwrought nonsense and it should be self-evident to any thinking person that it’s overwrought nonsense, but in case it isn’t: in the first place, “consequences for one’s actions” doesn’t only mean “punitive cruelty,” and it’s either disingenuous or very unimaginative to suggest that it does. In the second, it has literally nothing to do with what anyone deserves and everything to do with the principle of the thing. Namely, that human dignity is a thing no matter how bad the human in question is; that cruelty brutalizes everyone involved; and that the moment you start carving out those exceptions you’re pulling blocks out of the fragile jenga tower that protects you from similar cruelty, because all anyone needs to do to put your head on the chopping block is make a halfway convincing case (or even just an emotionally compelling one; not sure how anyone can exist in the year 2020 and believe you actually need a rational argument to sway loads of people) that you’re one of the Bad Guys.

Spoiler alert: it’s almost always the most vulnerable people who are first on that chopping block, and almost never the hypothetical Bad Guys that folks rage against when they’re arguing for making exceptions.

Maybe it seems like I’m coming on a little intense here. Obviously bullying is not waterboarding, and I’m not suggesting that it is. But the argument follows the same underlying pattern: it’s wrong to bully people for being weird unless they’re Too Weird, in which case we’re doing them and society a favor by piling on the hurt and humiliation because that will ~definitely~ fix the problem rather than perpetuate cycles of harm, and also we just feel in our hearts that they deserve it and get a bit of a sadistic thrill from the idea of giving them what they deserve. And I do not trust an argument in that mold. I will never trust an argument in that mold.

It’s the same faulty moral logic, every time, and the sooner you learn to recognize it - in yourself and others - the sooner you can tell it to fuck off whenever and wherever it appears, and the clearer your perspective on a whole lot of things will be.

Judd Legum and Noel Sims at Popular Information:

This week, Newsmax — a far-right news organization with a strong allegiance to President Trump and a history of pushing wild conspiracy theories — announced it had struck a deal with Meta. Under the agreement, Meta will “draw upon Newsmax’s significant current reporting as well as archived content across its platforms to support AI queries across Meta’s apps and devices.” Newsmax CEO Chris Ruddy said the company was “pleased to work with Meta to help ensure users have access to timely, high-quality journalism through AI technologies.” Although Meta’s AI products are currently less popular than those of OpenAI and other rivals, CEO Mark Zuckerberg is investing hundreds of billions in data centers and other infrastructure to catch up. Zuckerberg is also aggressively integrating AI into Meta’s suite of apps, including Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, which collectively have over 3.9 billion monthly users. In short, how Meta’s AI products are trained could have enormous impacts. The financial terms of Meta’s deal with Newsmax were not disclosed. Newsmax is not an objective news source but a far-right organization that routinely distorts reality to suit its ideological goals. NewsGuard, which uses journalists to rank the credibility and reliability of news outlets, gives Newsmax a 20 out of 100. Newsmax “is unreliable because it severely violates basic journalism standards,” NewsGuard concluded. Newsmax received similar ratings from Media Bias/Fact Check (”Low“ for factual reporting) and Ground News (”Very Low“ on factuality.)

Ruddy is a longtime friend and informal advisor of Trump. He is a member of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club, where the pair frequently dine together. Ruddy was described in the Washington Post as a “pioneer of America’s looming misinformation complex — making a name for himself by pushing stories that badly lacked substantiating evidence.” After the 2020 election, Ruddy praised Trump for attempting to undermine the credibility of the election, saying it made more people interested in the news. “You know what? At the end of the day, it’s great for news,” Ruddy told the New Yorker in November 2020. “The news cycle is red-hot, and Newsmax is getting one million people per minute, according to Nielsen, tuning into Newsmax TV. I think it’s good.”