The Difference

[rowyn]

I'm at Panera, and I don't really feel like writing anything in particular. But I do really feel like playing 4thewords, so Imma just ramble for a while.

My Twitter feed is All Politics All the Time Now. A big popular thing is Punch Nazis in the Face. Some white nationalist dude got punched in the face and my Twitter feed is now all Pro-Violence

Comments

[rowyn]

The people who find "let's all punch nazis in the face" a funny meme do not bother me nearly as much as the people who are trolling anyone who doesn't agree. I can get why people find it funny. Getting up in arms because other people don't think it's the best idea ever is taking it way too far. v_v

I so hear you about not wanting to promote "kill the bad guy" as the ideal form conflict resolution. I wrote The Moon Etherium and The Sun Etherium both because I wanted stories where the good guys do not win by killing the bad guys. The tidy narrative where heroes kill people because they're bad people and that's all they can ever be is viscerally gratifying but I do not think it is true to life. Real people do not divide nearly so neatly into "good" and "evil". The point at which we decide a large fraction of the population is "evil" and can only be stopped by killing them is also the point at which we consign a large fraction of the population on "our" side to death, too. Because the people we decided are evil are not going to just lie down quietly and die because we decided they need to die. In the real world, this is not a story that ends neatly and happily.

On a somewhat-related note: one of the reasons I was deeply disappointed by the film version of V for Vendetta is that the film turned it into a standard "evil people do evil things and are stopped by good guys killing them". While the original graphic novel was about "why normal, ordinary people do evil things". It is about the banality of evil, about how people who think of themselves as decent human beings can be convinced that utterly repugnant things are justified. Its message was "IT CAN HAPPEN HERE", and I feel like that is such an important message. That if we don't understand how we, ourselves, can become Nazi supporters or fascists or authoritarians, that if we keep thinking it's only a thing that "evil people who are not like us" could do, then we are way more likely to end up on the wrong side of the Apocalypse. v_v

[3rdragon]

I'm behind on The Moon Etherium (surprised?), but that gives me even more incentive to catch up on it! (You may be pleased to know that I lost forty-five of sleep the other week due to failed will saves on TME vs. bedtime. But life without bedtime is unpleasant enough that I get a lot of bonuses on that will save, and bedtime eventually won out.)

Oooh, I haven't read/watched V for Vendetta, but that reminds me of the other thing I was going to say: the people on my Twitter timeline posting "life under authoritarian regimes is okay for most people" stuff were definitely doing it from a place of pointing out that you don't wake up one morning and discover that it is now We Are Living In A YA Dystopia Day -- it just happens gradually, bit by bit, and your life changes in subtle ways until at some point you're there and didn't notice, but it's not so bad after all, is it? That there's not going to be a watershed moment where you can stand up and put your atheist/agnostic/Christian/Jewish/whatever self down as Muslim on the religious registration form, and you probably won't even realize the registration has happened unless you have Muslim friends who talk about it. I'm sorry that those nuances were getting lost in your Twitter feed. But then, Twitter's not really very good at nuance, is it? And I say that as someone who's definitely guilty of checking (and posting to) Twitter more than LJ.

[rowyn]

Twitter is where all my friends go to talk politics and it is SO BAD at politics. UGH. x_x

I am glad to hear you are reading TME, behind or otherwise! Today's installment is one of my favorite parts. ♥