curlicuecal:

warpedellipsis:

shinelikethunder:

Fuck, I miss the days when puffed-up intellectual posturing was the universal currency of fandom arguments.

For one thing, the wank was a lot more harmlessly entertaining than it’s been since the shift to a currency of puffed-up moral posturing.

But there’s also something subtler that I was only able to articulate earlier this evening. When most of the arguments are about who’s got the biggest nerd-dick, it’s possible to go “wait, back up, that thing you just said was waaay over the line” and not have it be part of the game. Criticism of someone’s behavior is more-or-less independent from the subject of the argument–not that it’s never dragged in as a tactic for winning the argument, but it retains the capacity to be independent. And generally, social norms will maintain an expectation that it be kept independent and only invoked when it actually applies, and that it can be invoked on either side without affecting their status in the debate (i.e. whether they’re right or wrong).

When the arguments are about who’s got the biggest social justice dick, all bets are off. Accusations of unacceptable behavior are one of the core elements of the debate. There is no “look, you may have the most righteous point on earth, but god you’re being a flaming asshole about making it”–that’s a move in the game, traditonally parried by accusations of tone-policing. The result is a lack of meaningful limits on how toxic you can be in an argument. Predictably, it tends to devolve into an arms race.

Not that the “intellectual posturing as debate currency” model isn’t vulnerable to pathologies of its own–but ultimately, they’re nowhere near as destructive to a community’s social fabric as making the unacceptability of someone else’s behavior the terms on which every single fucking petty fandom wank is fought. Right down to flamewars over whose ship is better.

>making the unacceptability of someone else’s behavior the terms on which every single fucking petty [issue]

It occurs to me that this is the same thing that nasty people and abusers rest everything on? It’s never about the actual subject, it’s always an emotional battle about how vile of a person you are and how *that* means you’re wrong and they’re right.

I’ve been trying to articulate for a while how this shift to the personal and the character-based and the “aha! I have discerned your TRUE NATURE” make it nearly impossible to counter them in any meaningful way. It becomes and assertion of the other person’s identity and motivations and internal beliefs.

When other people claim the right to assert your identity and internal self… the argument has moved so abstract and emotionally-fraught it’s going to be almost impossible to actually debate anything.