On Thursday 31 December 2009 16:40, Ryan wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 31, 2009 at 3:23 PM, Rick Pikul <chakatfirepaw_at_gmail.com> wrote:
> > On Thursday 31 December 2009 00:52, Ryan wrote:
> > > There's plenty of other little subcultures out there that
> > > would say a collective "HELL NO" to a lot of the stuff that goes on
> >
> > within
> >
> > > furry. Now, I'm sure they have their own problems, but this
> > > 'corruption' issue is probably not among them.
> >
> > Care to name any?
> >
> > It's certainly not any that could be described as a fandom.
>
> Er, sure. I don't know, but I suspect that Louis L'Amour fan clubs don't
> and put up with pedophiles and people who think diapers are sexy.
No, westerns have people trying to recreate and live in a frontier that never
existed.
No various groups all have the same fringe activities? No, and arguing that
particular types of oddball are not found in every group is nothing but a
strawman argument.
> The
> folks who go to Hemmingway look-alike contests still probably don't have to
> fuss with that- and they actually wear costumes!
Capital L literature has many of the same issues that literary SF has.
> There's probably
> thousands of examples of fan-communities based around automobiles, authors,
> politicians, some artists, all kinds of stuff, that doesn't have to deal
> with this.
Politicians? You don't even need to glance at the fans before you have enough
issues to fill volumes.
How many people have the fringes of furry fandom killed? One fringe of
automotive 'fandom' has killed several dozen people in Ontario alone, many of
which were innocent bystanders.
The fringes of art fandom go as far as to commission international crimes.
> Your examples were SF fans, gamers, anime fans, and furries-
> stop and realize that 99% of the time, you're talking about *the same
> fucking people *in each group, or at least the same class of people. Once
> realize that not everybody, and not every fan-community consists of 15-30
> year old internet addicts looking to escape from reality by any means
> necessary, you'll see that furry turning out the way it did was by no means
> a given.
With SF, it's not big names in fandom, it's a fair number of major writers who
regularly win the major awards that are at issue. When I mentioned sexual
harassment suits waiting to happen, I meant it and was talking about people
like Ellison.
> > No internal purity drives have ever succeeded in either getting rid of
> > the fringes, improving the subculture's image or stopping those that are
> > going to
> > tar everyone based on what the most extreme do.
>
> Well, of course not, because at any given time, only a very small
> percentage of a subcultures membership (or, those that ever participate in
> discussion, as opposed to just quietly consuming the material) would ever
> WANT it to succeed- the vast majority would instantly rise up to whine and
> bitch about 'who are we to judge' and 'stop the persecution' and things
> like that. It's just the nature of who we are. And by 'we', I mean again
> the 16-30 year old internet escapist crowd, who tend to equate standards
> with fascism.
Nothing to do with that, it's that all the moral outrage, at best, creates
rules that stop people from doing what almost no one in even the extreme
fringes are doing. In general, all it does is bring outside attention in a
way that makes tiny fringes look like major components.
Frankly, in cases like furry fandom, it's all about stuff that causes no
actual harm that the person whining simply doesn't like. Furthermore, the
complaints all exaggerate both how much there is, and how public it is, (the
whole Burned Furs thing about diaperfurs was over a handful of people who did
nothing that would be noticed by anyone outside of their locked rooms).
> But that's just my point. It's only because most people in these
> fandoms have that attitude, that these problems exist. People act like
> stepping back and refusing to judge makes them neutral, like it's away to
> avoid causing problems. But it's not- it causes *this *problem.
"This problem" is largely a fantasy that almost no one outside the group even
knows about. It was a tempest in a teapot when the Burned Furs were whining
about people liking things that they didn't approve of, and it's even less of
an actual issue now.
As I said before, the freaks aren't taking over the fandom. If they were
going to, they would have done so back in the days when Mark Merlino was
still running Confurence, (and even then, it wasn't people from CF who
brought an entire brothel to the hotel). As I also said before, if your real
issue is that "the freaks aren't hiding", then the person with a problem is
you.
If what you want is more 'normal' stuff, then I suggest you either get your
hand or your pocketbook creating more.
[1] 10 pages at my images/page setting.
--
Chakat Firepaw - Inventor & Scientist (Mad)
Received on Thu Dec 31 2009 - 17:55:43 CST