Day one of long weekend

[flemmings]

Long because Canada Day is a Monday. Next year it'll be a Wednesday and, for the first time since 2015, a singleton holiday.

Tumblr is getting on my nerves. Posts from people I'm not following show up randomly on my dashboard, over and over again, and it seems the only way to get rid of them is to block the poster. FB at least has a 'hide this entry' function, which amazingly puts it one up on tumblr. Equally, I understand that 'fandom is on tumblr now', but judging by the second hand noise I hear (people I follow reposting someone else's answers to a third party's posts), tumblr fandom is a) very young and b) wankier than anything seen previously, GW and HP included. Because now it's youth plus self-righteousness, slamming Neil Gaiman for gay-baiting(!) and Rowland for associating with TERFs (and therefore being a TERF herself, since youth has never heard that guilt by association is a fallacy.) Fandom Wank, thou shouldst be with us at this hour.

Am slightly cranky because my body woke me up, irrevocably, at 4:15 this morning for no good reason. Eventually took an antihistamine and went back to sleep ca 7 a.m. Body then proceeded to cough all day from draining sinuses choking my throat. It's a bad allergy year, and probably about to get worse with next week's heat. Is also the stink time of year when the fragrant flowers of May give place to... oh, I don't know what: lilac wannabes and linden droppings and mock orange.

Incidentally, my front lawn tree was supposed to be an ironwood, but the arborist says it's really a basswood , ergo a linden. 'Fragrant flowers', the webpages say, which is one word for them. Could make a soothing tea from them, or put them in my bath to reduce hysteria. Yeah, sure.

Cherries are red red red and the noisy birds feast on them all day long, which makes me happy, because sweeping up pits is much easier than sweeping up half-rotted fruit. Gorge your fill, little birdies. Now, at the end of my seventh decade, I realize that I can't tell birds apart by their cries but am newly aware that they do make different sounds. None of them strike me as melodic, mind : I'm especially puzzled at Shelley's 'profuse strains of unpremeditated art.' Shelley was smoking the good dope. As for nightingales singing in Berkeley Square- well, someone posted the sound of a nightingale to the Rivers of London FB group and, er well, I'd be tempted to chuck a stone at something that made a noise like that. But then I have little use for birds at the best of time. They're still dinosaurs by me.

Comments

[incandescens]

I saw a thread on twitter criticising Rowling for following people the writer declared were TERFs. It was ... stupid. I mean, (a) as you say, guilt-by-association is a fallacy, and (b) at least one of the people mentioned was someone who's a major anti-Brexit figure, whom I follow myself. Why am I reminded of Communist show trials with people having to apologise for reading counter-revolutionary propaganda?

[flemmings]

Moral purity seems to be the shibboleth. If you're Wrong on the point the poster feels strongly about, then you must be shunned completely. Of course I've also seen the back and forth of 'just saying, this person is a TERF!' 'No I'm not, you're saying that because I disagreed with you about xy or z. Here are my anti-TERF credentials.'

Show trials and/or McCarthyesque indeed.

[lebateleur]

And it's a particular species of self-righteousness that's uninterested in recognizing paradoxes (let alone proposing solutions to them). E.g., if it's unacceptable to get fannish over XYZ media if one isn't XYZ (because, appropriation), but it's also unacceptable for people who aren't XYZ to not consume XYZ media (because, invalidation), what then, is the best way forward?

You can pretty much insert your category of choice into this equation and somewhere, someone in tumblr fandom is fussing over it.

[flemmings]

I understand why, in the present political climate, accommodation has gone by the board, because who wants to accommodate Nazis? But it's sad that the rigid mindset has invaded fandom to this extent. Mind, there's always been a streak of absolutism in western thinking, which I of course blame on the Christian tradition in general and the Puritan tradition in particular. And what are you gojng to do about *that*, one wonders.

[lebateleur]

Well, yes, but there's a difference between accommodating Nazis and accommodating Neil Gaiman after he makes an ugly comment about "a few dead Indians" or what have you. It's unnerving for me to see that absolutist thinking labeling itself "liberalism" or "tolerance." But maybe that's precisely what happens when religion is no longer attractive to people to whom rigid mindsets still are.