The Wordsmith's Forge

Useful to know there is a word for this:

zabernism -- misuse of military authority; bullying

I was amused by this post about marriage equality in Kentucky, link courtesy of my partner Doug. What caught my attention was this bit:


Whatever your job is, you never know when it will give you an opportunity to showcase your morals on a public stage.  Sometimes, the best way to do your job is politely declining to do your job.  Justice can be refraining from perpetrating injustice.

Well, this is irritating.  Gittip is a platform that enables small weekly payments, explicitly aimed at helping people pay bills because bills are regular and thus benefit from regular income.  Trouble is, the folks behind the platform are unsupportive in ways that make it hostile to women and minorities.  *headdesk*

This poem is spillover from the June 3, 2014 Poetry Fishbowl. It was inspired by prompts from rosieknight, redsixwing, LJ users Moriwen1, and Siege. It also fills the "passion" square in my 5-22-14 card for the origfic_bingo fest. This poem has been sponsored by Anthony & Shirley Barrette. It belongs to the series Polychrome Heroics.

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This poem is from the November 2013 crowdfunding Creative Jam. It was inspired by a prompt from jeshyr who wanted to address the issue of bystander pity and curiosity, and mobility devices as empowerment. Several poems in P.I.E. have come directly out of requests or comments from people with disabilities, which has really added a lot to the complexity and verisimilitude.  It also fills the "curiosity" square in my 8-13-13 card for the origfic_bingo  fest.  This poem is posted as the free epic for the June 3, 2014 fishbowl reaching the $200 goal, selected in an audience poll, and I'm amused you did that right after "Going Places" was posted. Point and counterpoint at your convenience; tell ALL the stories!

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 I came across this favorite song today, "The Freakin' FCC."  That's basically my opinion on censorship.

 Know your rights: If you are serving on a jury, and you believe the law is unjust, then you can choose to release the defendant regardless of the evidence.  The justice system works very hard to prevent people from knowing this.  Spread the word, because it's a vital part of producing actual justice.

Conversely, if you need to get out of jury duty, tell them that you know about jury nullification and plan to inform all the other summoned jurors.  People are routinely kicked out of courthouses for talking about it.

My partner Doug found this bit of stuff that networks into a large mesh of issues, some of which I've already touched upon or read elsewhere.

It begins with this piece, where actually the title is what interests me: "We'd Like to Thank Our Commenters Again For Generally Not Being Jerks." That's ComicMix, an excellent source of news and discussions in this field; you've seen us linking there before. The quality of their audience is not an accident. It means they're posting the kind of content, and managing discussing in such a way, that attracts reasonably decent people. That takes work. I'm really proud of my audience here for similar reasons, and it makes me happy to see someone else having a similar effect.

From there we go to the next post, “Let’s see how feminist you are when you’re begging for more”: The violent, sexist world of comic website comments." It discusses what happened in response to a critique, "Anatomy of a Bad Cover: DC'S New "Teen Titans" #1" by Janelle Asselin, a former editor at DC comics. She described how the sexist elements of the artwork could alienate female viewers, driving them away from a title that has historically held a considerable female fanbase in an industry that usually doesn't. The result, predictably, was the usual dogpile of rapetastic abuse. But the response was unusual and worthy of note.

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Here's a post about the "Not All Men" meme.  There are several problems tangled together here.

1) Derailment is a real issue, when an advantaged person interrupts a disadvantaged person in a way that stops a socially useful conversation.

2) Overgeneralization is a logical fallacy.  Whenever you hear "all," "every," "always," "never," "none," or other absolutes then this fallacy is probably in play.  Phrasing things that way is sloppy debate and a bad habit to overcome.  The way to interrupt it is to emphasize "SOME" or "NOT ALL" so that the conversation can refocus on a more precise and logically apt area of the topic.

3) It is not any more okay or less damaging for women to bash men as a whole group  than for men to bash women.  A man can't help that he was born with a penis.  He can choose his behavior, so it is behavior, and not being a man, that discussions should focus upon.  Maleness is biological; manhood is a social construct.  If you are looking in the wrong place for the problem, it is unlikely to get fixed.  That is especially the case if you alienate other people who are trying to work on the problem.

4) Arguing rarely solves problems, especially if people care more about winning than fixing anything.  While people are arguing about whatever it was the woman originally complained about, and then arguing about how NAM is derailment, nobody is usually looking at the parts that are actually relevant to solving the problem:
* Some men treat women well.
* WHY do they do that?
* WHAT are they doing differently?
* HOW can we encourage more men to treat women well?


So if you see an argument devolving into a brawl for the above reasons, try linking to an example of healthy  gender interactions or an action point that lets people do something constructive to improve gender dynamics.  Move the problem-solving forward.  Yelling at each other will not do that, just add to the stress.