#paradoxcase

paradoxcase replied to your post “Reply-Reply to ArrowsforPens: Second Suburb”

The potential to create SBURB improved hugely with the introduction of VR

Yes u_u

I’m surprised that they got the essential control scheme, a two-player game where one character is basically an overseeing Ghost able to change the environment and the other is IN that environment, down so quickly.

“Okay, now I'm curious about what you saw of the Tea Party. (Not a new...”

This is fascinating. Can you offer any insight into why McCain picked Palin as his running mate? It seemed very out of character. Was he trying to appeal to the Tea Party?

As I remember it- note, I was a young teenager and may be misremembering things- that was one of the biggest factors (the Tea Party was a bloc by then, though I don’t remember if they were going by that name yet-- I think that wasn’t until after the election). But there was other stuff at work here and it’s all pretty fucking interesting.

See... McCain has always been a pretty establishment Republican, for all his I’M A MAVERICK! A MAVERICK, I TELL YOU!!! spiel. Where he does diverge from the party line, it’s to the left, not the right- for example, he has a principled objection to torture because he was a POW.  And... I don’t quite understand how it works, but in the establishment chunk of the Republican party, there’s a practice where sometimes in an election there’s an understanding that it’s one particular candidate’s turn this time and the party leadership will throw their effort behind getting that person elected. It’s quiet, genteel, unspoken, but it’s there. 

In 2008, it was McCain’s turn. He won the primary without too much fuss- sure, there were other candidates, but it was his turn. He was getting older, 2008 was probably the last year he could run for president and serve a full eight-year term, and he had built up a lot of political capital. So party leadership backed him and the primary went... relatively smoothly.    

But when he won, there were two things he just plain hadn’t counted on.

1. Barack Obama, not Hillary Clinton, had won the Democratic nomination for president. 

No one on the Right saw this coming. No one. Before 2008 Obama was a senator with a not-especially-flashy record; sure, he was an up-and-coming politician, he’d had a distinguished career as a lawyer and he’d written a few books. But no one thought he had the political capital to run for president, and he was super young. In 2008, he was the guy you kept your eye on to see what he’d be in 10 years- and then he won the nomination. He was charismatic, funny, and relentlessly optimistic-- while also being intelligent, diplomatic, and statesmanlike.

In 2008, Hillary was almost as anointed as she was in 2016. Before the primaries really got under way, the media consensus on the right was that it was going to be Hillary vs. McCain, and McCain would win. Because, as everyone knows, Hillary is kind of a wonk and is bad at playing to the crowd. She didn’t have the ~folksy, down-home charm~ that McCain was planning to bank on. 

Obama had it in spades. And Obama had the youth vote. And the black vote. And the Hispanic/Latino vote. If he was elected, it’d be historic- he’d be the first black president. His campaign managed to get people who almost never voted to vote in the primaries, just out of sheer faith in the guy and knowledge that they were making history. 

 He came out of nowhere and zoomed to prominence overnight. He did everything they’d hoped their candidate would do, and did it better, while clearly being smarter and more Presidential. And he did it all while being black. 

By the time the primaries were done, conservatives were fucking terrified of him.

2. The bloc that would become the Tea Party haaaaaated how close McCain was to the party establishment. Haaaaaaaaaaaated. 

You could have seen this one coming, even if you were on the right. But most people didn’t care enough to pay attention until the end of the primaries, because it was McCain’s turn. Ron Paul (among other hopefuls) got a fair amount of the vote, because people wanted something Different. Something that the main branch of the party wasn’t going to give them. They wanted someone who’d be like Bush, but even more so- someone ‘dumb’ and folksy, a ‘man of the people’ in the pejorative sense. someone who held their positions on Moral Issues and wasn’t going to back down, or someone who wouldn’t support the neoliberal economic agenda the Clintons and Bushes more or less consistently had. 

And what they got was McCain, who looked to be more of the same. They weren’t too happy. 

So when it came time to pick a Veep, the qualities they were looking for were something like this: 

Culture warrior 

Outsider- not a mainstream Republican

Can pick up southern and/or Midwestern states that McCain can’t grab

Can get disgruntled Ron Paul + etc. voters interested in the election again

Can get disgruntled Hillary voters to consider voting R

If possible, black and/or female 

Yeah, at least half of the reason for choosing Sarah Palin was really naked, ugly identity politics that would make your most identitarian leftist indignant. See, both Obama and Hillary were historic candidates- if she’d been elected, Hillary would have been the first female President, and of course Obama was the first black president. McCain was... well, just another white dude. No one wanted to vote for McCain because he was historic; it was just business as usual.

So McCain’s campaign thought, rather cynically, that they could peel off some disaffected Hillary voters by putting A WOMAN!!1! in the vice presidency. See? It’s historic if you vote for us, too??? We have A Girl????? You voted for Hillary because you wanted A Girl President, right?????    

The other thing was, of course, the kind of identity politics even Republicans think is valid; IE: dealing with the voting bloc that would become the Tea Party. Since McCain had never been much of a culture warrior and stuck with the massively-unpopular ‘establishment’ side of the Republican party most of the time, they did what they could to counteract that- mostly, McCain played up how much of a MAVERICK he was in all his ads and the debates, and they picked a vice president who was about as hard line of a culture warrior as they could get.

Sarah Palin has a huge family, a child with Downs’ Syndrome and a pro-life stance based almost 100% around using said child as a prop, a gun fixation, and that frontier backwoodsy kind of “HEY, I’M FOLKS LIKE YOU” thing that Republican voters like. She’s perky and snarky, but nonthreatening. She’s much more traditionally femme than Hillary and in general reminds most conservatives of the women around them- their mothers, wives, sisters, + etc. She’s a culture warrior. She set herself up to be sort of an avatar the Tea Party bloc could project their hopes on. And after all, McCain was pretty old, whoever he picked to be his VP could wind up much more prominent than expected...... 

Of course, Sarah Palin wound up being much, much more of a liabiliy than an asset, and she’s one of the things that cost McCain the election IMO. She was supposed to be an anti-Obama, anti-tea party nuke, and someone forgot that nukes don’t just blow up the people you point them at. 

What would a story that doesn't have a linear plot but does have a central viewpoint character who wants something very much look like? Because the only real sort of non-linear stories I remember reading are stuff like Catch-22, where it's not so much about Yossarian as it is about giving you a general picture of things and having a lot of mini-protagonists with intertwining stories, or it's some sort of generational story like One Hundred Years of Solitude.

I don't think the definition you're using is the real one. Privilege is just certain things being easier for some people than others. Power is a separate thing, although it can be related. There is no "level" of privilege, there are only different kinds of privilege, which can't really be compared on any scalar metric. Any kind of analysis like this that starts with technical social science terms as defined by tumblr is doomed to failure.

The problem is that a) there’s no written-in-stone definition of most SJ-related words and concepts, even in academia, and b) the loose, Tumblresque definition of the word ‘privilege’ is the one you’re most likely to see in the wild.

If there were clear, objective definitions of words- like the 1 kilo weight they keep in a vaccuum chamber to keep the kilogram standardised- then you’d be right, I’d be wildly off-base here. But most words have fluid definitions, and many words have different definitions in different settings. Furthermore, the most common definition of the word is the one that’s used (and misused) in popular settings, regardless of whether there’s a more ‘correct’ definition. 

I’m sure there are academic definitions of the word ‘privilege’ that are clearer and more elegant than the one most commonly used on Tumblr, and do not fall into the pitfalls that bad Tumblr discourse can fall into. Multiple definitions, which are fiercely debated by various feminist/afrohumanist/queer-theorist scholars. The trouble is, no one is using those definitions outside academia. 

The definition of the word ‘privilege’ that people use on Tumblr is derived mostly from a badly-remembered version of Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack. It looks like the full version of the essay is more complicated than the version I read on Tumblr (hah, fancy that). But the Tumblr understanding of ‘privilege’ is based on the metaphor that ‘privilege’ is like not having a knapsack full of rocks; every marginalised person has one or more rocks of Disadvantage in their knapsack, and privileged people can’t understand why they can’t keep up. This definition combines the academic concept of privilege (which I always understood as ‘having blind spots; not having to notice other people’s problems’) with the academic definition of social power (being able to do more in the world than other people).

I think this is a good (if flawed) metaphor, but when you combine it with several other toxic tendencies of Tumblr... well, you get the really shitty understanding of privilege I talked about in my essay. 

The whole ‘privileged people should sit down, shut up, and listen’ thing, for example, means that in order to have a voice in SJ communities, you have to prove that you are as Disadvantaged As Possible for people to take you seriously. For example: if you’re a man who wants to talk about male rape/abuse, you absolutely have to be a survivor and be willing to talk about it in gory detail. If you aren’t or don’t, people will assume you’re trolling. (And even if you do, they will accuse you of going ‘what about teh menz’. I’m not speaking from experience here, why do you ask. </sarcasm>) 

Another example is the way that people - again, on Tumblr- tend to assume that someone who disagrees with the Prevailing Tumblr Opinion is a privileged person. I have an acquaintance who’s mixed-race and disabled, and has unpopular opinions about both things. (For example: she doesn’t think alternative medicine is culturally appropriative, and she is strongly pro-recovery.) You would not believe how much hatred she gets for ‘being a white girl’ and ‘being an abled person’, because she has an opinion that other people don’t share. Clearly she doesn’t have the same amount of rocks in her backpack that they have, or she’d see that they were right; she must be privileged.

And the thing is, because Tumblr culture has a pretty large amount of influence on younger feminist/queer/anti-racist communities, this definition of privilege is the one that’s spread in the wider sphere, and it’s kind of choked out any other definition when it comes to SJ. Heck, ‘privilege’ used to mean ‘the rights noblemen have that common folks don’t', and outside of the UK, you don’t see the word used that way often. If enough people start using a word a certain way, that becomes the prevailing meaning of the word- regardless of whether it’s the ‘right’ one or not.  

So this definition of privilege is the one you’ll find on pop-feminist websites; it’s the one you’ll find when Very Serious People in the more mainstream media start talking about those ~wacky feminists~ and the ~things they believe~; it’s the one that’s (maliciously) misinterpreted by conservatives and by the alt-right. 

I think that definition is extremely flawed, especially because (again) it doesn’t recognise that privilege is a fluid quality, that it changes over time, that the whitest-cissest-straightest man in the world can still lose privilege by doing certain things and the blackest-transest-gayest woman in the world can still claw out a certain amount of privilege for herself, or that the amount of privilege you have is highly dependent on your society and the circumstances around you. I think even some of the more academic definitions I’ve heard are flawed in this way, but the prevailing Tumblr understanding of the word is completely broken.  

paradoxcase replied to your post: Minor Winter Interlude

I never thought it would start snowing in Texas before it started snowing in Massachusetts

Yeah, that’s TOTALLY not weird at all or anything, is it :| :| :|

Honestly when I found out about this it killed me inside because I wanted to write books, but I immediately realized that I was fundamentally unsuited to this field in just about every way possible and there's basically no way I could ever be good at it or that it would ever be a good choice for me

...I’m sorry. :( 

paradoxcase replied to your post: Minor Bilbo Interlude

It seems like half the stuff on tumblr is screenshots of someone’s twitter rant, I think you’re fine

paradoxcase replied to your post: Reply-Reply to ParadoxCase: Adversion Discursion...

Right, but adverse means more like unfavorable or harmful, whereas its “averse to” when you’re talking about being opposed to something. But they probably are merging; “averse” is extremely idiomatic to me and only really exists in the phrase “averse to”.