#discourse norms

[king-of-men]

tumblr com/king-of-men/786078765726973953/

Jesus Christ KoM, that was the most rhetorical of rhetorical questions. Can I ask for a favor here and have you delete that reblog? I feel bad knowing that, if they see it, your response might make them feel more bad than they already do.

Ok, as a favor to you I have deleted the post; I wasn't unaware that I was being a touch rude. But I also ask you to consider what will happen when the suffering of individuals is made into an argument for violence that cannot be answered, because it's rude and perhaps distressing to point out that violence is what they're asking for. Isn't that how we got into this fix in the first place?

As for being a rhetorical question, I submit for your consideration that I gave it a rhetorical answer, which is the correct response to such questions.

[sandybrett]

You've heard, "I didn't say it was good, I said I like it," now get ready for "I didn't say it was bad, I said I don't like it."

I don’t know how to say this in a way that doesn’t sound like I’m advocating for casual cruelty or whatever but something that grates so much about this current social moment is how many people are incapable of saying they dislike something or someone without cooking up some higher morally correct reason for their dislike. Sometimes you just disliked a book. Sometimes you don’t “get” an actor or a musician. There’s nothing morally wrong with your girl’s fuckass boyfriend he’s literally just annoying and you’re annoyed that you have to pretend you like him when you know he’ll be history in six months. It’s fine. You don’t need to justify your dislike.

[knifearo]

"asexual discourse" is so funny cause dude that's not discourse and it's never been discourse. it's not an argument and it's not a conversation bitches are just yelling at us unprompted and then making up people to get mad at 😭

[spop-romanticizes-abuse]

tfw people dismiss steven universe's queer representation because "they're just sentient rocks" or "they're genderless so it doesn't count as queer romance" but they're completely okay with shipping a girl and her abusive cat sister.

[thirdity]

We must not, for a moment, ever think that our exploration of discourse is free, complete; rather, those explorations are always policed by discourses already set in place.

Samuel R. Delany, "The Rhetoric of Sex/The Discourse of Desire"

[proserpine-in-phases]

This post bugs the shit out of me because it completely divorces the author from the culture of the time she was writing in and ignores the fact that having nonvillainous gay characters in her work at all was actually insanely progressive, and not allowing fanfic or art was just. How it was. She was no where near anne rice levels of protective, and in fact her fan forums in the early 2000s did allow fanfic to be posted as long as the characters were all ocs.

Like, circling back to the gay and trans rep, she was writing in the 60s-90s, when being openly gay got you openly beaten to death in most parts of the us, reagan let the aids crisis go unchecked because of the perception it was only affecting gay people, being gay got you dishonorable discharge from the military, queer people had no civil protections from retaliation if their orientation was discovered, and anne McCaffrey was making gay dragon riders be the protectors of her fictional planet. Like. That's not homophobic especially for the times. She wouldnt be considered progressive by TODAYS standards, sure, but most of the pern books came out 40 years ago when dont ask dont tell was progressive policy.

And for a straight woman in her 50s writing background gay characters she was being pretty damn progressive for her time

PLUS op doesnt even bring up the most truly homophobic this she ever said which was her tent peg theory of homosexuality. Like do a little research before popping off

[chipjrwibignaturals]

stupid ass discourse on the dash sorry

[bookhobbit]

I have no idea if this is just like an artifact of What I'm Seeing Lately. So it could be purely bias in what's crossing my view not a real thing. But I've seen such a sharp rise in the last like 2ish years of Girl Power popular media being like "only losers ask you to split the bill! Yuck!" I feel like when I was growing up it was pretty common for Girl Power popular media to be totally okay with splitting the bill as a sign of, like, Equality In Relationships. Is this...an actual change? Is it just a change in what I'm seeing rather than what's out there? Idk. Weirds me out though.

[depreciated-dragon]

[Image description: You are not immune to "I am feel uncomfortable when we are not about me?" End I.D.]

A friendly reminder that

[sam-keeper]

at this point I'm just unfollowing anyone who engages in left-punching nonsense. zero patience for the liberal refusal to self-critique or hold their leadership accountable.

[like-tears-in-rain-storms]

Look guys, I'm trying to have a good time here. I got into Warhammer 40k to cope with how shit goes in real life, the last thing I need is to have to suffer in silence the pathological stupidity of whatever loon decided to use the tag. Fandom is large, I read almost everything, adore the art, like how flexible and how imaginative it is, even if some of my own interests are underrepresented, I don't begrudge people their interpretations or their tastes, the universe is huge enough for all of us. BUT, while I stay silent and keep swimming at every 9 out of 10 offensively stupid takes I see because I value my sanity, doesn't mean my patience won't run out and I won't call out the 10th for the sheer reason that I've run out of fucks to give. I'm saying it just so we're clear, if you like starting shit or belittling parts of the fandom with stupid arguments, or any such idiocy, don't be surprised if I call you out for it. My comfort in not getting my blood pressure sky high is just as valid as yours in treating your tumblr like your personal diary/therapist.

Please let the only crippling issues in the fandom be the canonical daddy issues.

These people know who they are. To all the rest, to end on a pleasant note, keep rocking and thanks for the support these last days, and as always Ave Dominus Nox.

[specialagentartemis]

"Odysseus never once cheated on his wife!" wrong "Odysseus spent 10 years slutting it up around the Mediterranean sleeping around with every women he met" also wrong. can we move on now

[depreciated-dragon]

#not 100% endorsed but I'm more to this end of things than the other#I get that a lot of things were never really meant to take off the way they do for one thing

yall gotta start qualifying your thoughts with some sort of admission of subjectivity, i feel like every post i see is some declaration of subjective opinion stated like its a fact and its making me deranged

[epiphainie]

i'll try to say this in the kindest way possible but what if we don't post bucktommy critical or bucktommy negative posts that people originally censored/kept out of the bucktommy tag by screenshotting them and putting them in the tag? people are allowed to hate a ship. idk what to tell you but they're allowed to have their opinions even if their reasoning seems stupid to you or it very obviously comes with bad faith arguments. as long as they're being decent enough to not cross the line and do keep it in their own tags/blogs, you don't have to be fighting them in our tags. if you so want to, sure do it on your blog, in your dms, in your discord servers. but i'm tired of seeing the blogs i know i have blocked for their silly takes because we keep circulating what they're posting in our own tags. seeing a collage of the stupid, negative, downright homophobic comments curated from all sorts platforms in the bucktommy tag, in fact, feels no different in practice than seeing the antis post in the bucktommy tag, especially when you don't add the useful tags like "discourse" or "fandom criticism" to your posts.

just my own two cents, hell maybe it just bothers me idk, then keep doing it i guess.

[thirdity]

What it is necessary to remember, in order to make discourse a strong concept, is that it is the materialist side of reason and ratiocination, of understanding and history. It is all very well to explain that electric lights were simply not very common seventy or eighty years ago. [...] It is another thing, however, to explain to people today, whether they remember kerosene lamps or not, that, in a pre-electric light era, the creation of illumination always meant an expenditure of time and physical energy at least as great as that of lighting a match (which is already several times more than turning on a light switch) — and the vast majority of times meant an expenditure of physical energy far greater than that, an expenditure, which, to be efficient, was embedded in a social schema that involved getting candles, fuels, regularly trimming wicks and cleaning the glass chimneys, chopping wood and stoking fires, so that even the casual creation of light in such an age was an entirely different social operation from what it is today. [...] Thus, because of our vastly different relation to it, light itself was a different social object from what it is today. And thus, every mention of light, in any text from that period, whether it be in the deadest of hackneyed metaphors or in the most vibrant and vivid poetry, is referring to a different order of object. What we have begun to explore here, of course, is the discourse of light. It is the discourse that, explored in enough detail, can revivify the evil, distant, flickering lights that haunt American writers from Nathaniel Hawthorne to Ambrose Bierce, even as they turn into clichés in the later writings of Lovecraft; we must remember that initially such lights usually meant fires in the distance — forest fires or homes caught from some light source (got out of control), which, at the time, was always a flame source too.

Samuel R. Delany, "The Rhetoric of Sex/The Discourse of Desire"

[depreciated-dragon]

[Image description: a screenshot of a tweet from Kazuki Yamada, saying: "My position on argumentation is often sourced from a phrase I read in a Japanese book: Always remember that to argue, and win, is to break down the reality of the person you are arguing against. It is painful to lose your reality, so be kind, even if you are right."]