I want to say a huge thank you to Sir Terry Pratchett, an author who shaped my sense of justice hugely while I was growing up.
He taught me that it’s important to protect the weak, to resist oppression, to think three moves ahead about the consequences of action and inaction. To care about people because most people are just like you, regardless of how many sausages inna bun they’re currently trying to sell you.
Pratchett’s stories aren’t about warriors or soldiers or kings. They’re about people who work hard and send money home to dear old Mumme and Dadde. They’re about con men, grouchy old ladies, down-to-earth prophets, and wizards who’d rather eat a big lunch than throw a fireball. They’re about people with no power and powerful people who know better than to use it.
Out of context screengrab from the next Movie Nights!
Ten years ago I would not have predicted that geek culture would plunge the world into political chaos.
So much of the alt-right grew out of online geek culture (GG is a good example). Which I guess makes sense b/c it’s a group of ppl who feel like outsiders but are in fact quite privileged (white, male, str8). And we all know what happens when you make white str8 men feel even slightly disenfranchised.
A layer the media has not picked up on is the gamification of the alt-right. It is a game played for nihilistic pleasure. Every woman, POC, queer, trans person intimidated – every social justice space ‘infiltrated’ – scores points for the nerd nazis. Geek culture was perfect breeding ground for this. Like geeks intensely nostalgize the media culture of their youths, so too the altright. It became easy to like a nostalgia for media culture to a nostalgia for nationalist culture. Both are reactions to a rapidly changing world.
Geek culture is also an intensely male-centric space (despite or perhaps bc of it’s slightly effeminate stature in the wider culture). The Hussy once quipped that the only gender binary that mattered anyone was Tumblr vs. Reddit. Which is so real and relevant to this. Reddit and the chans, w/their male-centric and game-ified trolling cultures, gave birth to the bastard child that is the alt-right.
That nazi-who-gets-punched actually hit on something when he said that neonazis don’t like him. We’re dealing with a v diff demographic. The geek alt-right stuff is not coming from the uneducated rural working class whites – it is coming from educated white nerds. These are guys who work in STEM. At least, this was who originally started it (GG, etc.). Now it’s snowballed up all kinds of other opportunistic white nationalists. We have a bunch of identifiable groups who previously wouldn’t have spoken to each other forming a coalition of awful. I think that maybe be separating out each group we can find strategies best suited to countering their particular brand of terrible.
It’s fascinating in a way bc so much of the geek culture is about resisting fascism. But these men’s nostalgia for their uncritical childhood takes (“cool explosions! space travel!”) blinds them to this. Don’t “not ALL gamers!” at me. Of course it is not all individual geeks. But this subculture is what gave birth to the alt-right. The sneering way the left dismisses the alt-right as uneducated is simply not the case, which I guess is one of the points I’m making here.
The Gaters are really the direct antecedents of the current alt-right. The Gate is how they learned to organize, gameify harassment, etc. GGate was where this generation of white right-wingers became radicalized. I’m not even sure they’re accurately described as rightwing. Many are essentially apolitical but find it fun to relax into racist tendencies. And I think that’s why we have particular difficulty reaching them: we’re trying to convince them of politics but they are apolitical. They don’t actually care about politics: they’re using it as a game and as a tool for lashing out about their feelings of disenfranchisement. A lot of this is classic trauma behaviour also: many of them were bullied as kids and now are getting “revenge of the nerds” via same tactic. But instead of lashing out at the power structures that created their trauma, they’re lashing out at the ppl they think threaten their power.
Sarah Schulman’s Conflict is Not Abuse is basically a roadmap for how this type of thinking works, if you’re interested in learning more.
Any Islamophobic, Racist Shitbag/Donald Trump Jr: “If I gave you a bowl of skittles and three of them were poison would you still eat them?”
Eli Bosnick: “Are the other skittles human lives?”
Any Islamophobic, Racist Shitbag/Donald Trump Jr: “What?”
Eli Bosnick: “Like. Is there a good chance. A really good chance. I would be saving someone from a war zone and probably their life if I ate a skittle?”
Any Islamophobic, Racist Shitbag/Donald Trump Jr: “Well sure. But the point-”
Eli Bosnick: “I would eat the skittles.”
Any Islamophobic, Racist Shitbag/Donald Trump Jr: “Ok-well the point is-”
Eli Bosnick: “I would GORGE myself on skittles. I would eat every single fucking skittle I could find. I would STUFF myself with skittles. And when I found the poison skittle and died I would make sure to leave behind a legacy of children and of friends who also ate skittle after skittle until there were no skittles to be eaten. And each person who found the poison skittle we would weep for. We would weep for their loss, for their sacrifice, and for the fact that they did not let themselves succumb to fear but made the world a better place by eating skittles.
Because your REAL question…the one you hid behind a shitty little inaccurate, insensitive, dehumanizing racist little candy metaphor is, IS MY LIFE MORE IMPORTANT THAN THOUSANDS UPON THOUSANDS OF MEN, WOMEN, AND TERRIFIED CHILDREN…
… and what kind of monster would think the answer to that question… is yes?”
you deserve love. your crush does not owe you a date.
you deserve success. your coworkers do not owe you extra hours.
you deserve emotional support. your friends do not owe you free therapy.
what ‘you deserve this’ means is that it’s ok to want it and hope for it and try to achieve it, not that you have the authority to demand that a person provide it. it’s good to ask for it, but you have to be willing to take no for an answer.
ok rebloging this again for ppl who arent callan bc he worked out that you can use this same math to rate your d&d characters and its fucking hilarious
So one of the people on my street works for Sky TV and drives one of their vans. It has hannibal painted on one side which to be honest sets me on edge a little. It parks outside my house regularly as i don’t drive so don’t use that spot.
When i come down for work at 5am i usually open the curtains to see what the weather is like. Some days im open them to see the house across the road. Others i open them to see this particular van outside with Hannibal staring into my living room. Sometimes i forget to close the curtains at night and when i come down for work at 5am i see this.
It is terrifying and you can’t escape it. You either have to live in the dark or live with this staring at you while you try to watch TV.
I go to make a brew and it follows me. I watch TV and its there. I close the curtains and my dog cries because she wants to sit on the windowsill and stare at it.
I mean, is it reasonable to ask Sky to repaint a van because Mads Mikkelsen is staring me down when i try to eat my cornflakes?
callanswall 