cimorene

The academic field that I abandoned after a couple of years all those ages ago, without writing a bachelor's thesis, was sociology. In recent years, when it occurred to me to potentially (someday) finish the degree now that it's easier to study at a distance, I've started occasionally gnawing away at what (sub)fields there are of interest to me, if any.

And also lately I've been occasionally thinking about organizational culture. With all the discussions swirling around problems with the OTW in recent years and the mental comparisons I've inevitably made to the volunteers and committees related to the Unitarian Universalist congregation I grew up in, I've always wondered if science (but it might be more likely to be psychology than sociology?) has something to tell us about the dynamics of volunteer organizations and why it is that they seem to be so similarly prone to the same kinds of failings. I tried to google the idea a bit, and it seems the concept of organizational culture has pretty much been taken over from sociology by business schools in recent years, and yuck, but also I'm specifically thinking about volunteer organizations here anyway. I know there is a body of research on charities and the problems that arise as they scale up, which is also interesting but maybe not exactly what I'm thinking about.

There was a recent national scandal in the Finnish Red Cross (up on the west coast of Finland some way away from here) to do with a boss who turned out to have been abusive for a long time to a whole bunch of employees, and it hasn't really led to a thorough reckoning or even a complete investigation by a third party, although people have been fired and resigned. This is nothing ESPECIALLY shocking; big charities have scandals like this with some regularity, and this isn't even nearly as bad as some of the international Red Cross scandals I remember in my adult life. I suppose this probably is dealt with in the research on the problems with big charities that I mentioned. The Finnish Red Cross, at the national level, has a high degree of transparency and a lot of regulations and checks and things, but perhaps these regulations are more complete and more useful in terms of the volunteers, members, and leadership, and less so in terms of the stuff that's staffed by employees?

And this Hugo disaster now is just absolutely flabbergasting. The fact that it now looks like the genre's hugely prestigious literary awards were made fraudulent for the whole year mostly at the instigation of one volunteer Western bad actor probably prompted in large part by ignorant racism?, assisted willingly by a bunch more Western volunteers who didn't sound the alarm at the time even though we hear that more than one was uncomfortable - the fact that it was apparently not even difficult for this to happen with the active efforts of what looks like perhaps quite a small group of people, possibly without any input from Chinese participants... it's bizarre in multiple ways, frankly, but one of the most amazing things is the level of institutional failure implied. I know the Hugos and Worldcon are run by small volunteer committees and that we're not talking about a huge number of people involved in planning. But at the same time, they're an institution that operates at the scale of Worldcon, with a huge community that they represent. The inevitable conclusion that they've been running like this all along, apparently held together with chewing gum and string, with most of the participants passively nodding along even to something as absolutely crazy as this...! That there are no built in checks or balances with enough robustness to ensure that someone with the ability to go "Wait just a goddamn minute here" is going to see what's happening before it happens! And that someone can coast into such a key position even if they're known by a bunch of people around the community after multiple reports to multiple conventions to be a serial sexual harrasser! It's a stunning indictment.

Somehow recommendation algorithms always manage an insane oversupply of my pet peeve, whatever it is, and they're so DETERMINED about it that there must be an underlying function that produces the peeves in reality (or in my mind) - and it must be one simple enough to be described by an algorithm.

Sommmmmmmmething about intersections that occur exactly one ring outside my area of interest and the much higher likelihood of those things turning into peeves, when other more distant (but fundamentally even less congenial) things, even things I dislike more on an absolute scale if I take a step back, never have a chance to do that. Oh, like the dynamic that determines what music you hate and find 'overplayed', which is also contingent on your particular exposure.

It's a funny experience to interrogate something about your personality or temperament as the direct result of a viral "relatable" post.

What (very often) happens to me is that a post in the "Relatable Sentiment" genre comes around like, say, "Kudos just aren't as good as comments but I'm still grateful for them because they're better than nothing," and then there will either a ton of emphatic agreement or worse, a string of eloquent and elaborate agreements.

Usually it's as I read through the agreements that I'll eventually start to wonder about what causes my preference and how rare it actually is (because I'm sure that Relatable posts by no means are composed only of near-universal experiences; by the nature of social networks, people who don't relate are far more likely to ignore them than to engage with them to disagree, not least because contradiction is always prone to being read as unwontedly argumentative or even angry and aggressive in text-only interaction).

(There are also lots of "Unpopular Opinion Time"-genre posts that contain what will strike many, or at least plenty, of people as an opinion that isn't at all controversial or unpopular, so the OPs in that case are likely influenced by memorable examples of the opposite opinion that they've experienced as more universal or popular than it is.)

Especially because positivity is so much more socially acceptable to express publicly, and because in many cases someone being a little more positive than they actually feel is a calculated choice that could be regarded as social engineering (philosophies like 'you catch more flies with honey') - and combined with the fact that one thing I can always be sure of is that I'm significantly less positive (critical, pessimistic, etc, but I certainly got chastised not to be so "negative" all the way back to early childhood) than most other people - it's difficult to guess just how genuine the positivity level is, or how dominant a positive opinion really is, and how much is due to exaggeration (and other people with more critical thoughts refraining from engaging).

Since Wax and I are interested primarily in English-language & international film, we've never bothered with purchasing an actual tv. Getting all our media via the internet has greatly reduced our knowledge of domestic shows, so I've never actually encountered a Finnish remodeling or design series until I found Kotoisa ("homelike", "cosy") on the MTV streaming service. (I've had brief accidental exposure to reality tv at the homes of my in-laws, but this is typically Swedish reality tv because they're Swedish-speaking. Plus my instinctive reaction to dating shows and talent shows — MIL and SIL1's choices — is to move as far away as the limits of the house allow and try to block out the sound.)

Well, in the last 2 days I just learned, from this tv show, that it's normal for adult professional Finnish acquaintances to greet each other with a hug in certain circumstances! And I just learned this ( after 15 years in Finland, lol. )

On the show, the designer and the contractor are welcomed by the homeowner(s) to their homes inevitably like so:

each set of 2 women hug

each possible combination of man and woman hug

each set of 2 men shake hands

(This is also what happens when the two sets of hosts who usually work on separate episodes meet at a collaboration, so they aren't strangers in that case but they also aren't being welcomed into anyone's home: friendly work acquaintances who are happy to see each other but don't do so on a routine basis, I guess?)

So anyway. They seriously do this!

Can you even see yourselves, straight men? Are you for real right now? Out here in public behaving like this and not expecting to be laughed at????

Current Location: toxic masculinity... is sometimes hilarious
Current Music: gender, politeness, culture, finnishness, finnish vs finland swedish

David Smail's Power, Responsibility and Freedom: an internet publication - Responsibility (at Archive.org)

At first, in the early 1960s (in Britain), the dominant philosophy in both psychiatric and psychological spheres was crudely mechanistic and 'objective' in the sense beloved of behaviourists. 'Mental illnesses' were illnesses like any other, imposed on the hapless victim through events beyond his or her control and largely devoid of meaning as far as his or her personal life was concerned;
or else they were the result of 'maladaptive' habits acquired through more or less accidental processes of conditioning. [...] When, therefore, theoretical innovators arrived on the scene such as R.D. Laing in psychiatry and Carl Rogers and George Kelly in clinical psychology, their introduction into the picture of notions like meaning, subjectivity and responsibility (often borrowed from European phenomenology and existentialism) brought fresh, new perspectives which many of us seized on with relief and enthusiasm. The 'organism' that had been the object of the clinical gaze became a human being whose troubles were to be understood as the product of a particular life.

[...]

For what seems to me to have happened over the years is that a mechanistic and objectivist approach to people's distress that, while it didn't overtly blame them, dehumanized them, has been replaced by a 'humanist' and 'postmodernist' one that interiorizes the phenomena of distress and - often explicitly and nearly always tacitly - holds people responsible for them. Even though the pendulum seems to have swung from an almost entirely exterior approach to an almost entirely interior one, the problem of responsibilty has not been solved: formerly we had people for whose condition nobody was responsible while now we have people whose condition is largely if not solely their own responsibility. The reason for this is to be found in what these two extreme positions have in common: a studied avoidance of the social dimension.

It is true that, as the pendulum began to swing (for example with Laing's work), the social power-structure did indeed become visible for a moment, even to the extent of spawning 'radical psychology' movements. However, as far as the mainstream is concerned, the possibility that emotional distress is the upshot of the way we organize our society has never been seriously entertained and at the present time is if anything further than ever from any kind of official recognition. The imputation of responsibility is absolutely central to this state of affairs.

There's a good quantity of his writings online (he's also written some books that I haven't read). Smail definitively places the blame for most mental illness on society. He goes further, even, in the rest of the abovementioned internet publication (series of essays?), in a way that reminds me of a lot of postmodern analysis that I've read (although he doesn't identify as a postmodernist), in his efforts to show how much of our lives is socially determined and the huge extent to which this fact is obscured by language and institutions, including, he contends, most of the content of psychotherapy.

The above quote's "interiorization" is driving at the same type of idea I mentioned in my post on 'plastic free' living, that an overemphasis on subjectivity in mental health treatment (or on individual actions such as choosing what to purchase) is serving primarily to shift the blame, or responsibility, from societal structures (which cause mental illness along with all the other suffering as a result of the exploitation of the many for the material benefit of the few - and which, in the plastic example, allow megacorporations to pollute and to produce and use plastic at tremendous rates which account for the vast majority of plastic usage) to individual people. ( Read more... )

Current Mood: psychology, sociology,
Current Music: david smail, capitalism, depression, anxiety, stress

I think I read somewhere something like “Everyone has ghosted someone, even if it was only by accident”, but do we think that’s really true? HAS everyone ghosted someone?

And if so, does that mean everyone has been ghosted by someone?

Is it something that occurs in both directions with equal frequency, or does the ratio correlate to personality traits or other features? Would it make interesting patterns if we graphed it, or just average out to a 1:1 ratio?

I wonder how you would go about graphing the emotional reactions with which people regard ghosting-events in their past, outgoing vs incoming. Like are there people who regard people they ghosted with fondness/nostalgia and people who ghosted them with the same emotion? Guilt, regret, confusion?

My hypothesis would be that nostalgia, largely positive, with a minor undertone of guilt, would probably dominate the majority of people’s emotions when considering people they had ghosted in the past, while resentment or confusion would probably dominate the majority of people’s emotions considering people who ghosted them. (Considering virtual-only, mutually romance-free relationships exclusively.) But this is just my impression based on things I've heard and read, so it’s an unscientific sample and those could also just be the ones people are likely to talk about.

Another imaginary post-it for the imaginary file of studies I’d like to read about if someone else does them.

on Tumblr

I posted a critique of a highly dubious news headline on Tumblr here.

The headline that set me off was this tweet:

@pinknews: "STUDY: Straight women judge emotions and thoughts better than lesbian women"

In a nutshell, their sample was only 67 straight women and 43 lesbians. All the straight women were psychology undergrads from their university with a mean age of 19, while the gay test subjects were recruited via fliers in cafes/the internet and the top of their age range was over 30.

There's board elections coming up for the OTW and some unfunny business emerging. I have seen comments to the effect that people *would* have considered involvement/not shunning the name of OTW and spreading malicious sniping about AO3 but now that they've seen how extra-wanky it supposedly is they should instead run away. ( But honestly, OTW's just a large volunteer organization having a periodic but by no means unprecedented flare-up of dysfunction and infighting due to conflicting views and growth/change, and that isn't so different from other such organizations. Every now and then everybody involved wants to rip their hair out and they try to work that shit out and the only way to do that is for members to continue to push for what they believe in. It's not a special evil unique to the OTW. ) The people I see posting meta about this are doing their best: honestly airing their thoughts and talking to each other and sometimes having large alcoholic or tannin-laden drinks, which looks like an exemplary handling of the situation.

Looking at today's newspaper. Must be a slow day for news, because the lead image is extracts from the report on the country's highest wage earners. And, lol, Lauri Ylönen from The Rasmus is on the top 100 with his income of 400,000-something Euros per year! So, yes, Finland has less than 100 individuals who declare 1 million+ in income. That's so cute. (The Finnish population is around 5 million, I believe.) [ETA: In 2008, the US had about 5.1 million millionaire households and the state of Kansas alone had over 43,000 or 3.98% of the state population of ≈2.8 million.]

So. Anyway:

Last night I dreamed that there was a thriving industry in schmaltzy art and Hallmark cards, heavily featuring heart imagery, all produced by chimpanzees. When I woke, I was on the verge of saying, "But the question is whether chimps are innately twee or if they're socialized to be that way."

Chimp research + anthropology = OTP!, apparently.

Current Music: Ayria - The Gun Song (Headscan Mix)

I didn't check the syllabus before taking the 1-hr trip to suburb Pargas yesterday for the weekly meeting of my course for teacher's assistants, and so didn't realize that it was, in fact, Multiculturalism (aimed at Extremely White Non-Academic People from Finland AKA A Country That's 98% Insular and Racially and Ethnically Homogenous).

I immediately correctly guessed that I should have executively exempted myself, considering that I studied Sociology through all the Bachelor's level courses and quit only when it was time to write an undergraduate thesis, and that I was raised Unitarian Universalist on my English professor grandmother's considerable collections of world folklore (not to mention educated in America where in school I learned more about world religions than the Finns, which is hilarious considering Finland has the best secondary education in the world and America places 14th) (of course, that isn't universal in the US, where considerable latitude is given to state governments, city governments, and individual schools).

When I saw the first Powerpoint slide said "WHAT IS CULTURE?" I was like, Oh shit, and started ripping up my handout to make a series of progressively smaller origami cranes, which has been my habit whenever reading a novel through a boring class isn't possible, starting in 9th grade. (I had seven at the end of the class, four of which had small allover patterns drawn in ballpoint on both sides of the paper, and the smallest of which I folded using the tip of the pen when my pinky nail could no longer fit into the folds. I threw them all away on my way out.)

(LOL. This was entirely my own fault, by the way. Some of the class probably DID need the lecture and all of the lectures are optional.)

My dad, 3/4 Jew and 100% naturally and genetically irreligious, was raised in the Ethical Culture Society and UU congregations because his parents wanted people to have dinner parties and nature hikes with, and summer camps to send their children to. My mom was raised Catholic and didn't like it, and my parents were happily sleeping in on Sunday until they moved to Alabama when I turned 6 and I was plunged head-first into the Alabama public school system, and consequently exposed to Christianity enough to notice it for the first time.

At age five, I was impressed by Buddhism and used to tell people when asked that I was Buddhist based on children's books on the subject. But everyone (everyone vocal at least) in my new school was a Southern Baptist. They were all talking about Jesus all the time, as well as telling so many stories from Bubble Camp (their accents were very thick and it was several years before I realized that "Bubble Camp" was actually Bible Camp) that I wished to take part. When people asked, I said I was Baptist for a while. Even though it was clear I didn't know what it entailed, my parents decided I needed a positive influence, so they joined the local Unitarian Universalist group - today a Congregation, back then a Fellowship - which, at the time, was renting space from the local synagogue.

For the first few years, there were few volunteers to teach Children's Religious Education (CRE), which takes place during the service for UUs and thus denies those volunteers adult company. The debate raged on the CRE Committee over which UU CRE curriculum to use: the one based on Bible stories that we did my first year, or the World Religions one. For a while I think there was a time-share policy in place, but somehow I managed to almost completely miss any Bible-story learning. Most of my childhood Sundays were given over to World Religions. I also went to the adult services because I felt like clinging to my parents' arms a fair amount in the years my mom wasn't teaching, or whenever the topic of the sermon looked interesting. The adult "sermons" were usually not actually sermons; our group didn't hire a full-time minister until I was in high school. They were generally on current events, philosophy, science, civil rights, or history, and the last quarter to half hour or so would be given over to a congregation-wide open debate.

By the end of my third year in Alabama public schools (3rd grade, 1992), I had learned all the salient features of trying to argue about religion with crazy Christians (aka the futility of arguing with trolls, even though I didn't know the word 'troll'). This isn't to say that I completely stopped, but I put more effort into, for example, contradicting the Bush Sr propaganda perpetrated by Weekly Reader and the American History propaganda about Washington and Columbus perpetrated by our textbooks, and pro-choice arguments when my 4th grade teacher tried to preach anti-abortion during math lessons, and campaigning for Clinton on the playground.

There were gay couples, Hindus, practicing Jews and recovering Christians in the congregation when we joined. Over the years, my home congregation has had a handful of practicing Buddhists and Native Americans and provided a meeting place for the local university's pagan group (my mother took me to several meetings in middle school, but they weren't as exciting as fantasy novels had led me to expect, even if I did get to jump over a burning candle). None of these acquaintances were very much more than superficial, but at least they were there. Tokenism, privilege, Nice White Ladies: it's practically my native culture. True inclusivity often (usually?) starts with the well-meaning majority being accidentally insensitive (it took my parents and the practicing Canadian Jews several years to part the fellowship from its "Thanksgiving Seder" in favor of a truly multicultural Thanksgiving that made factually correct references to Sukkot and none to Passover, which is about freedom and fighting for it, and thanks for, you know, the plagues as opposed to for the HARVEST. Although this concept was not too difficult to get across to a congregation of college-educated former Christians, they still held onto it for several years because it was "fun" and "everybody liked it").

The guest lecturer was a MA in Psychology who teaches World Religions in secondary school (hilariously - or maybe it's just me - Wax's good friend Sofia is a Doctor of Religion who teaches Psychology in secondary school). She was highly animated, and included a number of anecdotes from her international travels, so the class wasn't mind-numbingly boring, even if the only new information I learned was that no other books may be placed on top of the Qur'an (but this applies only to the Arabic; translations aren't holy); Indians throw dead bodies into the Ganges; in the Orthodox neighborhoods in Jerusalem high-rise elevators stop on each floor automatically on the Sabbath so residents don't have to push any buttons, and men can't go before the Wailing Wall with their heads uncovered; and that Hare Krishna used to be the Swedish government's #1 Threatening Religion because they encourage people to cut off all ties.

I've had a hard time putting my finger on why some particular meta that I see from various incest-shipping communities perturbs me when I am, in fact, an incest shipper myself in some fandoms, both RPS and not. I mean, obviously the problem isn't the incest, then; so what, I thought, is it?

But as of now, I can put my finger on it!

It's a particular culture-centrism in a particular argument that I sometimes see. The argument basically attempts to deduce logically the incestuous(/sexual) quality of a relationship as a direct consequence of its intensity, or scope, or, y'know, bigness. Of course, there is a subtle difference between the bigness as a foundation for speculation - which is generally the biggest motivator for incest fic I think - and the argument that the bigness itself is inherently and also canonically implicative of incest/sexualisation. So that argument - the difference between "profound love... let's speculate on making it sexual" and "profound love is always inherently sexual" - is always in the background, in any incest shipping situation.

The problem is that that basic premise, "The sibling love relationship is the most profound love and most profound relationship in these siblings' lives" does not inherently imply incest. Or at least, that's certainly taking for granted a proposition that is at best highly debatable. Romanticising brotherly love, or to put it another way, making sibling love really BIG, as big as sexualised romantic love conventionally is, is just the starting point. It doesn't have to be, "Any time you love someone THIS much or more it automatically is sexual/is not brotherly anymore". It can also be, "Brotherly love CAN BE just as big as sexual love."

The reason I call this automatic sexualisation of love based on its, er, bigness culture-centric is that I view that presumption as arising from a deeply embedded, sometimes unexamined moral norm of modern Western culture: the privileging of sexual and romantic life partnership, or the nuclear family unit, over other forms of love and family.

Life-partnership is privileged in modern Western society and culture: the "highest", most celebrated, most romanticised, most rewarded, most socially protected form of love, and defined exclusively as 1) sexual, 2) romantic, and 3) monogamous. Sexual-romantic-monogamous life partnership (hereafter SRM LP - if there's an existing term I don't know it) is so fundamental to our society and culture that it can be difficult to see it as a construction. In this culture the so-called "nuclear family" (SRM LP + children) has been called a "building block of society", and the prevalence of the SRM LP model is easy to see in the extremely low acceptance of asexuality, bisexuality, and polysexuality/polygamy compared with homosexuality, or the transfer of the nuclear family model, sometimes called "heteronormative" in this context, to contemporary constructions of gay romance.

This is culture-centric because in many other cultures, the nuclear family is not the most important form of family, and/or SRM LP is not the privileged or most important form of love.

This week saw one of the loudest and wankiest outbreaks in the last year or two of the endless fight between people who support constructive criticism and people who think that if you can't say anything nice, you shouldn't say anything at all.

This iteration was a bit more entertaining than usual, however, because the issue had gotten pretty thoroughly mixed up with the separate but related issue of reviews and recs. I don't mean that the issues were conflated by participants who failed to distinguish between them, but that the discussion, especially in

lamardeuse's anti-concrit post, was divided between discussion of concrit and discussion of reviews, frequently explicitly separated by people on both sides of the argument, but then (apparently) conflated again just a few inches away, or even within the same comment - treated, although they were labelled as separate issues, as connected ones if not two sides of the same one. And I'd argue that that's not wrong.

Feedback and reviews are two separate things, but they are also two sides of the same issue: the interactions between the reader, the text, and the writer. (I put them in that order deliberately - fiction is at most a mediated interaction between reader and writer, and more properly an interaction between reader and text. The author doesn't have to be dead for that to be true. The author is simply irrelevant, at least until later when it's time to interact with her as two individual community members and not in your roles in relation to her story, because the author's not there in your head when you read.)

The conflation of feedback and reviews is a strange and fascinating issue for me in itself, something present in the comments of the post and something which I have encountered several times recently. There's a wavery line in fandom between the public (which recs and reviews by nature are) and the private (which feedback is generally considered to be, even though it is frequently performed in public, in which case it is often more a social ritual than a private communication).

i. the public and the private spheres

Most of us in lj-based media fandom generally regard as personal spaces the arenas where we interact with our personal friends which are frequently not, in fact, friendslocked. People also feel a natural sense of ownership of their own journals even when the contact is explicitly public, i.e. addressed to the public. Perhaps it is this and the journal-based fandom model's ability to fine-tune and filter privacy and participation for each individual user that causes this conflation?

( Livejournal's multiple functions have done for that web 1.0 culture what the mobile phone did for our physical lives: erased the physical delineations for our spheres of interaction. )

Moved here due to difficulties with the date function

Why I hate postmodernism, courtesy of xkcd!

Also see "a momentary functional condensation of the SPACE".

Current Mood: hungry

You know, if you're seeing something that pisses you off in anonymous formats designed for letting off steam like memes and secrets communities, but not out in public, it's a good sign, not a bad one. Why? It's not showing that anonymous memes somehow bring out any depravity or unpleasantness that could have been harmlessly concealed forever; it's showing that the social conventions you evidently feel so emotionally invested in which make it socially unacceptable to say those things in public are in perfect and healthy working order, even against strong impulses. Try looking at it with a philosophical bent, give a cheer for social norms, move on... and ignore the anonymous fora in future.

Current Mood: thoughtful

"No straight man would [wear that shirt, move his hips like that, cuddle a man like that, stand like that, like that music, wear that eyeliner]" is a lamentably common refrain in fandom. It's probably popular for all the right reasons, usually, because gay is a compliment from the fannish point of view.

It's also something I'll forever associate with tinhats (ie: slash fans who believe their RPS pairings are Really And Truly Real), because this was the favourite argument of the most famous tinhats of all - the Domlijah True Believers back in Lord of the Rings RPS fandom. The favourite arguments of the tinhats had to do with body language, despite the fact that they purported to have actual contact with a secret Source close to the happy couple who fed them messages of comradeship. Pictures of actors standing close together or looking at each other or standing in the same pose are purported to be incontrovertible proof of long-term coupleship, or sexual attraction: it's a So-Married pose, it's the kind of unconscious mirroring that grows up naturally after years of being Soulmates, etc.

But the argument in a more general sense usually has to do with gayness, and we see it a lot nowadays. But this statement is wrong.

A straight man could wear eyeliner, or a pink shirt, or stand like that. And would.

Because the only thing that no straight man would do is be in a sexual relationship with another man. That's it. They can cuddle, cry, talk about their feelings, dress how they want to, gesticulate, sound swishy, wear pink. These are all cultural prohibitions - they aren't naturally or genetically associated with sexual orientation at all. They're things that many men avoid in our culture (not, for example, in Japan) because they are frightened of being characterised as gay.

So if you're calling guys gay because they cuddle and kiss their friends, wear feather boas, cry, love shoes, talk with their hands, love showtunes - even if you're saying it because you LOVE them for it, because you love that they're that gay - you're reinforcing the very cultural norms and stereotypes which they're fighting against.

Current Mood: calm

1. Thoughtless rudeness is still just as rude as a racist conspiracy; the intent is different but the effect is just as harmful, and when you're a minority watching the majority culture reproduce the patterns that marginalise you, it doesn't matter to you in practise if they're doing it on purpose or not.

2. The last thing that any discussion of prejudice or offense needs is for minorities to be told to watch their tone. (It's the most frequent and most offensive demand I've seen in all these debates as they keep coming up again and again, and a persistent attachment to it is pretty much a permanent loss of my respect.) Unfortunately, they hear that so often that they're all well aware of its necessity if they wish to be listened to, and if they ever neglect to be polite it's no doubt in momentary frustration and with the full knowledge that they're going to be ignored by the people who need to listen to them as a result of their temporariy satisfaction.

3. Usually there's no reason to think there is a conspiracy, because no conspiracy is necessary to plausibly explain the widespread thoughtless behaviour, alas: culture-centrism is built into all cultures. To put it another way, the most fundamental characteristic of culture is its ability to make itself seem natural, logical, unchangeable, and taken for granted by its members. This is why raising the consciousness of the majority is a lot of work for other people even when the majority are trying to work at it too: it's impossible for most people to train their brains to question things which seem fundamental.

4. Because of #3, to members of the majority who are trying, or who consider themselves to be trying, intent is the most important element in every interaction. For a member of the majority, trying is the big challenge. This position is exactly the opposite of the minority's (see #1) and leads to even more conflict.

5. I parsed Merryish's admittedly defensive and confrontational statement as meaning it was offensive that Mama Deb (seemed to) imply a racist conspiracy was at work and not - as I see a lot of people interpreting it - as meaning that the act of stating her discomfort was inherently offensive. It's an understandable mistake since the latter is the position that many people take, but there is in fact a difference. In effect, it's a comment about her tone, and not a direct demand that she shut up. (As to whether the OP actually implied a racist conspiracy was at work, I think going only from the original post that's debatable. It read that way at first glance, but another look showed me the other interpretation.)

6. In this particular drama, while the discussion of racism is still very much relevant, the fact that the sign-ups were open for two weeks (and that such information is of course readily available to any interested parties at the community) renders the initial suspicion of conspiracy ludicrous. The long period of sign-ups is obviously intended to accomodate people who might be busy or absent for part or, indeed, most of the period; it's not like it's a week-long process.

Current Mood: pensive

That people look at one another and are jealous of one another; that they exchange letters or dine together; that irrespective of all tangible interests they strike one another as pleasant or unpleasant; that gratitude for altruistic acts makes for inseparable union; that one asks another man after a certain street, and that people dress and adorn themselves for one another - the whole gamut of relations that play from one person to another and that may be momentary or permanent, conscious or unconscious, ephemeral or of grave consequence (and from which these illustrations are quite casually chosen), all these incessantly tie men together. Here are the interactions among the atoms of society.

- The Sociology of Georg Simmel, ed. Kurt H. Wolff

He's like Durkheim only more emo! ♥

Current Mood: pleased

I'm reading badfic instead of sociology because reading in Swedish makes my brain itch. It's actually interesting! It's not like the stuff about Marx, which made me want to stab things - I actually want to know how it ends! (Okay, he lived in the 1800s, so I'm pretty sure he dies, but like - Which School of Sociology Will He Found? Will He Ever Give Some Awesome Burns To Those Damned Hermeneutics People? Why Did His Wife Stick Around If He Was Such A Momma's Boy?) (Although, granted, I already knew how Marx ended, having been forced to read about it ten times or something before, so to be fair that might have contributed to my exasperation.) But you know. Brain-itchy. It's probably the feeling of new neuron pathways forming or something and I shouldn't avoid it, but... itchy!

God, I'm so lame. I should. I don't know. Immerse myself or something. Read only Swedish for a while. ...Yes, and have horrible fanfic withdrawal. My life is so complex!

Current Mood: restless
Current Music: Arashi - Love So Sweet

This textbook pre-digests the classics of sociology for us because the professors in the department don't agree with me and

isilya that it's pretty ridiculous to allow someone to get a master's degree in sociology without making sure they've read [some of] the texts of the founding fathers of the discipline in an original non-pre-digested form. But I digress. /rant

So in the beginning of the section on Marx, it's all, "Marx's partner, Engels -" and, well, I know they were compadres and frequent co-authors and they worked out their theories together, but partner? I was like, what, was Marx gay and no one's ever mentioned that to me before...? But no, it's a linguistic nuance, a whimsy of expression, or a personal blip in my own brain.

However, if you were curious, there is one google hit for "Marx/Engels slash". ~~But it's more like epistolary posthumous unrequited longing, so does that make it Marx/Engels gen?~~

PS. I hate reading about Marx. It's like I'm allergic: as soon as he comes up my brain starts itching with boredom and irritation. I'd probably be as annoyed if there were some slash stashed away in there.

Current Mood: bored
Current Music: Timbaland with She Wants Revenge! hahahahahha HEART

Profile

Cimorene

July 2025

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
		1	2	3	4	5
6	7	8	9	10	11	12
13	14	15	16	17	18	19
20	21	22	23	24	25	26
27	28	29	30	31

Syndicate

Page Summary

Organizational dysfunction
sociological and psychological theory... of pet peeves
that completely unrelatable moment when
a new (!) observation on Finnish politeness and gender
Addendum to last post: it was David Smail
Ghosting practices and emotional reactions
critique of purported 'straight women more emotionally sensitive' study
Skip this babbling if you cringe at the mention of OTW
Chimp research + anthropology = OTP
Multiculturalism for Dummies (A World Religions Atheist Unitarian Universalist Education in Alabama)
incest shipping, the privileging of romantic-sexual love, and culture-centrism
Feedback vs reviews, conflation of; the public and private spheres of fandom
Feedback vs reviews, conflation of; the public and private spheres of fandom
hating postmodernism
anonymous fora & private conversation: because the true 'say nothing at all' option is an illusion.
Things That Guys Don't Do Unless They're Gay (Hint: There's Only One)
This accidentally turned into an abstract post on racism, dialogue and the Yuletide controversy
<3
Brain itching = spam
Marx/Engels: the most politico-historically significant historical rps otp?

Active Entries

Style Credit

Style: Practically Dracula for Practicalitesque - Practicality (with tweaks) by cimorene
Resources: Dracula Theme

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags

Page generated 7 Jul 2025 12:43 am

multi-fannish American queer cat & bunny owner in Finland

Entries tagged with sociology

Organizational dysfunction

sociological and psychological theory... of pet peeves

that completely unrelatable moment when

a new (!) observation on Finnish politeness and gender

Addendum to last post: it was David Smail

Ghosting practices and emotional reactions

critique of purported 'straight women more emotionally sensitive' study

Skip this babbling if you cringe at the mention of OTW

Chimp research + anthropology = OTP

Multiculturalism for Dummies (A World Religions Atheist Unitarian Universalist Education in Alabama)

incest shipping, the privileging of romantic-sexual love, and culture-centrism

Feedback vs reviews, conflation of; the public and private spheres of fandom

Feedback vs reviews, conflation of; the public and private spheres of fandom

hating postmodernism

anonymous fora & private conversation: because the true 'say nothing at all' option is an illusion.

Things That Guys Don't Do Unless They're Gay (Hint: There's Only One)

This accidentally turned into an abstract post on racism, dialogue and the Yuletide controversy

<3

Brain itching = spam

Marx/Engels: the most politico-historically significant historical rps otp?