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Authors Behaving Like A**holes


Myshkin

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24 minutes ago, IlyaP said:

I can't help but wonder if other Soviet ex-pats and historians notice certain historic parallels/similarities.  

I'm not sure what the point you're making is but if it's what I think it is there is, however bad you think it is, no similarity between government control driving what is and isn't allowed to be written about and public outcry and distain driving it. 

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25 minutes ago, polishgenius said:

I'm not sure what the point you're making is but if it's what I think it is there is, however bad you think it is, no similarity between government control driving what is and isn't allowed to be written about and public outcry and distain driving it. 

I was thinking of - and was more interested in - the harm done to social trust. (There's a separate argument that can be had around government vs. social stigmatisation, but that's an argument I've been having with my Very Soviet father for years, and no one needs to be introduced to that painful vortex.)

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5 minutes ago, Darth Richard II said:

Well poop

(Too many authors/writers to keep up with. Anyone who's able to do that in 2020 - they get the highest of high-fives from me for having an amazing amount of mental bandwidth!)

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You know what, I'm confused and a little uneasy about how quickly this thread seems to have gone from 'Richard Morgan is a transphobe, great that people spoke up to him, what an asshole' to 'trans people shouldn't have found that story uncomfortable and those that did should sit down and shut up'.  Coz like regardless of whether you think the story should have been pulled on the basis, a number of people clearly did feel attacked by it and multiple responses in here appear to suggest that they have no right to or if they must, we don't want to hear about it.

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I honestly don’t know what to think about the entire thing and really  don’t know enough to comment. I mean, Clark handled it bad, but if they did the right thing or not I have no clue, I mean once RoH gets involved, who has a history of getting trans people online to try and kill them selves, it becomes just...too many layers to unpack. I’m ranting a bit, but I have no idea what it must be like for trans people who legit felt it was transphobic. It’s just sad that it happened at all.

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16 minutes ago, Darth Richard II said:

I mean, Clark handled it bad, but if they did the right thing or not I have no clue, I mean once RoH gets involved, who has a history of getting trans people online to try and kill them selves, it becomes just...too many layers to unpack

This is the thing here: I don't really have an opinion on it myself; I've not read the story, I'm not trans, it's not really my debate.
It's just the repeated assumption in this topic that people bothered by it either can't really have been bothered and must be trolls, or didn't engage and just judged it superficially, that bothered me. We might not agree on whether it should affect what is published and we may certainly disagree on our own personal perspective of what's hurtfull but we can't be the lawmakers of what's permissible for others to find hurtful and frankly we as a whole community are usually far far better than that.

 

This is especially true of a piece of work that took a deliberately aggressive title and, it seems, a tricky stab at a premise. To suggest that people can have no genuine reason to feel attacked by it just seems odd.

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Sadly, when you have on one hand an author that is assumed by some, due to context, title, writing, to be a troll and complain about it, and on the other hand people who assume those who complained about that author to be trolls as well, we definitely have some kind of communication breakdown. And this happens among people who are on the same political side if not on the same subgroup - one fears to probe the depth of the breakdown at the level of the society as a whole.

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1 hour ago, polishgenius said:

This is the thing here: I don't really have an opinion on it myself; I've not read the story, I'm not trans, it's not really my debate.
It's just the repeated assumption in this topic that people bothered by it either can't really have been bothered and must be trolls, or didn't engage and just judged it superficially, that bothered me. We might not agree on whether it should affect what is published and we may certainly disagree on our own personal perspective of what's hurtfull but we can't be the lawmakers of what's permissible for others to find hurtful and frankly we as a whole community are usually far far better than that.

 

This is especially true of a piece of work that took a deliberately aggressive title and, it seems, a tricky stab at a premise. To suggest that people can have no genuine reason to feel attacked by it just seems odd.

Yeah I agree with pretty much everything you said there. 

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3 minutes ago, Darth Richard II said:

Yeah I agree with pretty much everything you said there. 

Ditto. 

Happy to provide information (links, et al), but I don't think taking a position here on something that's, from what I can tell, highly community-centric would be a good idea. Or even necessary. (I can see the animated gif already: "thanks for the opinion, random Slav guy!")

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:dunno:  Who is, who isn't, the a$$hole here? Is anyone? :dunno: 

https://www.vulture.com/2020/01/american-dirt-book-controversy-explained.html

Quote

....Book Twitter reacted to the announcement with swiftness, although perhaps not in the way Oprah’s team would have wanted, citing the recent #OwnVoices movement. American Dirt has been the subject of controversy and criticism since 2019, when early readers first offered their opinions after seeing advance copies. The book has been called “stereotypical,” and “appropriative” for “opportunistically, selfishly, and parasitically” telling the fictional story of a Mexican mother and son’s journey to the border after a cartel murders the rest of their family. One of the more common knocks is that the book engages in “brownface,” incorporating a nominally Mexican perspective that was written by a woman who — as recently as 2016 — identified as “white.” In the lead-up to American Dirt’s release, Cummins revealed she has a Puerto Rican grandmother. The conversation surrounding American Dirt’s “ripped from the headlines” approach to telling this migrant story in an American voice for American readers places it within ongoing debates in the lit world about who can tell what stories....

 

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Is it about time for everybody who isn't a cat to stop writing about cats who isn't a cat.? Or reading about cats, unless a cat?

Myself, I am really anti-cultural appropriation. But myself too, seeing so much brilliant work done in modes that aren't invented by the artist's ethnic / cultural / whatever heritage, and the brilliant fusions that also come from this, when artists of all different backgrounds work together -- we should be better at discerning what is authentic from what is ignorant. Lordessa -- just now, at the Havana Jazz Festival, there were so many different heritages working within the modes that Afro Cubans, Afro Latins, African Americans, etc. invented, and also those working together.

To see Havana's ballet school and company dancing in the streets along with New Orleans Jazz Band's second line (that has white musicians in it!) -- tells one all one needs to know.  Meaning that everybody involved knew what they were doing and were really really really good at it.

This perhaps is the real problem with what considered problematical works? The the writers generally just aren't very good at the job?

The Watchmen, run by a white guy, had a writers room that was almost entirely African American.  That worked!  He was good at his job.

 

 

 

 

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