Drifting down through the archives..

[shadowkat]

Drifting down nostalgia lane via old journal entries dated back to 2003...and finding interesting bits here and there, which look differently with age.


1.

So I drift on home and check the fanboards, actually I'm in reality checking my email and somewhat frustrated by the selection of job postings go to the fanboards to distract myself, they are okay today. My friend cjl seems to want me to write an essay explaining why I think B/A is dead, while he writes one explaining why it isn't. Yeah, right. I may be masochistic, but I'm not that masochistic.
Feeling rejected and bitter enough, thanks, so do not need to be flamed by the B/A shippers. Besides, I know the ship ain't dead. I may wish it were dead. But I'm tv savvy enough to know the only way that ship is going to die is if SMG decides never to reprise Buffy, which is doubtful since her career is currently based on Scooby Doo and the Buffy fan base.
SMG may be a lot of things, but stupid is not one of them. I'm afraid the whole topic just depresses me too much to bother writing an essay on it.

I should have written the damn essay. LOL. Having now seen all the episodes and read Whedon's comics, plus his comments regarding the two relationships, along with others from his writing team -- I was right, cjl was wrong. Bangle was dead in the water in S4 Buffy and S2 Angel. (I stopped shipping it at that time, because I figured out it was dead in the water and the writers had moved on. I don't ship against the story-thread, I'm not that masochistic. And it was pretty obvious to me, how Whedon saw the characters relationship after Innocence.) But at the time, it seemed both the fandom and the actors had a much greater influence than they actually had -- and I never thought they'd continue it in another medium. (Not that I consider the other medium canonical to the television series, just canonical to how Whedon envisioned it.)

Hindsight is twenty-twenty and all that. OTOH - I was smart not to write the essay. There were some bat-shit crazy Bangle shippers on those boards.



2. The other bit...is about Patriotism from a post I wrote in 2003, which is even more relevant today. (Oh and I found it amusing that I was complaining about Bush and politics back then...if I only knew what was to come, right?)

“Patriotism like honesty is a luxury with a very high face value which is quickly pricing itselt out of the spiritual market altogether. It is an emotion as well and of course the emotion comes first. A child’s home and the ways of its life are sacrosanct, perfect, inviolate to the child. Add age; add security; add experience. In time we all admit our relatives and our neighbors, our fellow townsmen and even, perhaps our fellow nationals to the threshold of tolerance. But the man living one inch beyond the boundary is an inveterate foe.”

I wonder about this statement. It says so much about our current foreign policies, even though the statement is about a territorial conflict that happened centuries ago. A conflict that seems hardly important to outside eyes – now that Scotland and England are one country under one sovereign. At the time, they were not, Scotland had it’s own sovereign and was involved with France for protection against the English. I’m no historian – this information is taken mostly from Dunnett’s novel – which I’m told is accurate. Now, I listen to news commentaries about countries at war with countries on their boundaries for reasons ranging from ethnicity to commerce. And in my country – the battle cry for the last year has been “patriotism”. You are either with us or against us! If you aren’t, you aren’t patriotic. I love my country and the people in it, well most of the time, and consider myself patriotic. But I do not believe war solves any thing, except more death and destruction. History shows that in rare circumstances is anything accomplished by sending men and women to kill other men and women for reasons understood mostly by politicians and no one else. So I wonder if there is not some truth to this statement of Dunnett’s? That our tendency to single out people as foes or irredeemable or our enemy merely because of environmental factors is placing a bit too low a price on human life and too high a one on the value of intangible concepts.

As if to answer my query, Dunnett goes on to state through Lymond’s lips:

“Patriotism. It is an opulent word, a mighty key to a royal Cloud-Cuckoo-Land. Patriotism;loyalty; a true conviction that of all the troubled and striving world, the soil of one fathers is noblest and best. A celestial competition for the best breed of man; a vehicle for shedding boredom and exercising surplus power or surplus talents or surplus money; an immature and bigoted intolerance which becomes the coin of barter in the markets of power – These are not patriots but martyrs, dying in cheerful self-interest as the Christians died in the pleasant conviction of grace, leaving their example by chance to brood beneath the water and rise, miraculously, to refresh the centuries. The cry is raised: Our land is glorious under the sun. I have a need to believe it, they say. It is a virtue to believe it; and therefore I shall wring from this unassuming clod a passion and a power and a selflessness that otherwise would be laid unquickened in the grave. And whose to say they are wrong? There are those who will always cleave to the living country, and who with their uprooted imaginations might well make of it an instrument for good. Is it quite beyond us in this land? Is there no one will take up this priceless thing and say, Here is a nation, with such a soul; with such talents; with these failings and this native worth? In what fashion can this one people be brought to live in full vigour and serenity, and who, in their compassion and wisdom, will take it and lead it into the path?”

I wonder the same now more than a decade after Dunnett wrote this. I wonder why we spend millions of dollars on defense when people are starving, homeless and without healthcare? I know it’s more complex than that, as Dunnett so cleverly states. But I wonder what price peace? When do we stop caring whether someone is a different color, race, creed, religion or nationality? Not that caring is wrong per se…but when it leads to hating, it is. What price tolerance? Maybe too high, methinks. The older I get the more I wonder if world peace just lies forever beyond our grasp. If our own inherent, somewhat competitive, dog eat dog nature prevents it. Perhaps like Cain we are doomed to forever kill our metaphorical brothers, unable to comprehend the simplicity of the phrase turn the other cheek as opposed to the far more damning eye for an eye…?

Several years later...I fear we have no better answers.

3. Fandom kerfuffles

I found this fascinating discourse between various people who have long since left LJ and DW, not to mention the fandom world, regarding people they couldn't read online, due to their toxic behavior.

Not reading people who piss you off

Which of course I broke, and ended up reading comments that pissed me off and I took far too seriously. I ended up writing a post about it and got some interesting responses. Various people who agreed, and various who didn't.

Now, with hindsight, I realize how silly it all was. Why I ever for one second cared or gave a moment's thought to what someone, who I never met, would not be friends with, and has now long since disappeared from the internet -- thought about a favorite character or my posts on that character is beyond me. Maybe it was that I feared her opinion would influence others? Like a stone rippling across the pond. I think that's what we all fear from bullies -- that others will support them. And bullies aren't boilerplate evil, they are human like the rest of us. Capable of wonderful and horrible things depending on the circumstances. That poster could very well be dead now, for all I know. I hope not.

I also learned something from those early days on social media -- when to walk away and no longer engage. You can't change someone's deep-set beliefs and views on social media. And as ponygirl2000 once put it "Arguing with a person who doesn't care what you think is a pointless exercise."

What I learned from all of this is -- a person you may despise on social media, may (as luck will have it) be beloved by your friends on social media. For a lot of reasons, but the main one may well be that they have an "off-line" relationship with the individual and have interacted with them outside of the internet. They may see another side of the person. They may have received gifts and spent hours talking on the phone or endured some real life travel nightmare. Written correspondence is not the same as face-to-face correspondence. A joke that may fall flat online, may be funny off, and vice versa. I may have a personality conflict with someone online while someone else won't. The worst thing about social media, or so I've found, particularly in forums or groups is that people (unwittingly perhaps) enable bullies. "Oh those stupid Spike shippers, it's all about the cheek-bones, and they are so sensitive, you aren't a bully. She deserved to be told off." OR "oh those deranged Angel shippers, who patronize and condescend, and bully everyone who disagrees." Substitute Trump and Clinton in the mix and the argument isn't all that different. I think it really has a lot to do with perception. And more often than not -- what we perceive to be true isn't.

Back in the day, I had a problem with a female online poster on a fan board. (A deranged Angel shipper, I don't know why, but they were always deranged Angel and Xander shippers.) I wasn't the only one she got into fights with this particular poster. Caused a bit of a problem on the fan board, because about ten percent of the people posting (also deranged Angel shippers) were friends of hers and had met her in person. (To be fair, I was ahem a Spike shipper. And deranged Angel shippers and Spike shippers were unmixy things. I think we'd have been fine if we were sitting in bar yakking over it, but online the nasty came out -- in spades.)

Now, much older, and hopefully a little wiser...I find it easier to let go of these things. And not worry over them. If I ran across her now, I hope I'd know enough not to engage. I think so - I've noticed that's how I handle it now. I just don't engage and move on. Or letting it go. Breathing my way through it. Other peoples truth isn't mine and vice versa. We don't see the world through the same lense and that's okay. Arguing endlessly over it..isn't healthy for anyone.

In a way, I'm thankful that she crossed my path, because she taught me how to deal with people who push my buttons. Don't engage. Don't try to change their minds. And don't discuss politics or other things that you will never agree on. And if they make you crazy, don't read them.

I've learned that sometimes it's better to just let people be wrong. ;-)

And...there's something to be said for being "careful" about tone in writing. I tend to be a bit snarky at times in my online writing, and I get very condescending/patronizing when someone pisses me off. Some people curse, I go into lawyer mode and just litigate them to death.

Wrote this post about Writing Carefully in 2004.

Comments

[mefisto]

As you rightly say, that person was a lunatic. I refused to read any thread she started, refused to read her comments, and refused to read any responses to whatever nonsense she spouted. I nearly gave up reading the board because of her.

[shadowkat]

I did give up finally -- and retreated to Tea_at_the_Ford for a bit, and then full time to LJ, where I could control who interacted with my journal. And no longer had to put up with people that pissed me off.

It got tiring.

[wendelah1]

(Oh and I found it amusing that I was complaining about Bush and politics back then...if I only knew what was to come, right?)

I was convinced that Bush II was the worst president we'd ever elected, worse in some ways even than Nixon. Those were the days...

The military spending is even worse, too. It's all worse under Trump.