This Post Brought to You By Procrastination

[alixtii]

I'm so ready for this semester to be over. I just . . . yeah. Over, please. You have no idea how much I want to bang my head against the floor until I am knocked unconscious and they find me passed out in the commuter lounge.

* * *

The "dogpiling" discussions make me laugh. So many interesting and productive conversations as a result of a soi-disant dogpile over whether dogpiles ever result in anything interesting or productive. Erm, case closed?

I mean, really. The Krystalnacht discussion was full of people wondering when it was okay to use historical tragedies and when it wasn't and how we could do it respectfully and whether oversacralizing the Holocaust makes it too easy to believe it can't happen again and there were so many different opinions. I wasn't paying attention to the internets as much during the OSBP because I still had some willpower left then but there were discussions about objectification and enlightenment and good intentions and there were guides how not to objectify and then maybe the guides were objectifying and again, lots of opinions.

So, exactly, where is all this groupthink and quashed dissent that's supposed to be going on? Do people really want to be racist or misogynist or homophobic or anti-Semitic that much?

We're fans. We analyze everything to death; that's what we do. For every two of us there's at least three opinions.

I mean, just looking at a week's worth of metafandom reveals the type of diversity of opinion that I honestly wouldn't know how to find anywhere else. Are people just in a completely different panfandom than I am?

Comments

[quillori.livejournal.com]

Has anyone suggested brainwashing is taking place? Or even that dissent is impossible? I thought the issue was merely whether dogpiling is a helpful and desirable way to police fannish standards or something that does more harm than good. I don't think any amount of dogpiling is likely to destroy fandom, or silence all debate or do anything exceptionally bad; I do think that, overall, we would be better off with fewer dogpiles and that some of the proffered defences of dogpiling are rather questionable. That fact that some people are put off posting, that some topics become lightening rods for wank, even when the poster is trying to discuss them seriously, that dogpiles can be indiscriminate and end up attacking people who in retrospect didn't deserve it, these are all examples of the darker side of pile-ups, and they are not mitigated by pointing out that other people are not put off posting or that there are plenty of people who have never been attacked.

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

Has anyone suggested brainwashing is taking place? Or even that dissent is impossible?

I feel like it, yes. This, admittedly, is one way that misunderstandings can occur when panfandom meta discussions take place--people end up judged by their allies' worst arguments. Still, I tend to think light is generated as well as heat.

[quillori.livejournal.com]

It's definitely a real risk, and once misunderstandings start, they general snowball. You respond quite reasonably to a stupid argument, I assume it's a response to a sensible argument and that you think attacking an overly dramatic straw man is a good debating tactic, and right there is the potential for a nasty fight when it's quite possible we are pretty much in agreement, or at any rate the area of disagreement is pretty small.