"in practice, “let people enjoy things” means something else: it is rude or inappropriate to dislike something." gawker.com/culture/let-pe…
"criticism — by which I mean something that demands maintaining distance between the critic and the subject, not a negative or positive viewpoint — is, in a fandom world, an obsolete exercise."
An interesting detail of the original comic is that the person who says "let people enjoy things" is literally the person whose pleasure is being threatened, but who then makes the object of the sentence the third-person "people" to mask their personal investment
thus we see the violence inherent in the system
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At the level of character and dialogue, The Chair is excellently done; at the level of plot, however, I have a lot of questions about how power is supposed to work at this university.
Everyone acts as if being chair of the department gives her a great deal of power--which allows everyone in the show to *blame* her for everything that goes wrong--but I honestly can't tell if the show thinks that being chair DOES give her any real power. If so, it is not shown.
The list she is given, in the first episode: what power does she have to force retirements? She is blamed for this list--and punished for it in the final episode--but the notion that a department chair can fire tenured faculty is... not supported by the text.
It's interesting that the pandemic remains essentially unrepresentable in narrative TV, film, and fiction. Creators are essentially producing narrative in an alternate timeline where the pandemic never happened.
This made a kind of sense back when it seemed like the pandemic might last a year or two. (Remember all the people dreading The Pandemic Novels to come, and calling for escapist media to not go into it?)
But even as it seems clear that the pandemic is going to go on--albeit, hopefully, in a much less deadly form--for a while longer, it's a lot weirder that pop culture, as a whole, is just going to pretend it never happened.
This is significant because the problem becomes something other than "how to persuade qanon addled reactionaries"; it becomes "how to do big government interventions that will succeed with disenfranchised populations"
Our healthcare system presumes that your health is your problem, and you should pay for it, and you should also do the work to figure out how to access care; given this starting point, it's not surprising that the same people who are always poorly served, continue to be
But if you are a Democrat who is invested in the status quo, and you don't want to spend money on supporting the poors, it is MUCH MORE ideologically comfortable to make the far right into the face of non-vaccination
This is the rational way we have learned to think, in the society that has produced the climate crisis: to chase well-being by picking up and moving to a new place, rather than thinking about the social connections and large-scale emergent properties that make life possible
(Don't pretend this kind of thought hasn't crossed your mind/haunted you! We're all made by this world that makes our future impossible!)
But I think a lot about how all of my dearest lifelong friends and family--the people that would drop everything to care for me if I were sick--are scattered across the country
The GOP's war on trans athletes is about transphobia, yes, but I think it also very nicely demonstrates what so many people think youth sports are for: COMPETITION. Not a communal activity that brings people together; sports is a WAR for victory that trans kids are STEALING.
For so many people, the idea that we have physical recreation for youth some reason other than a Nike-branded "SECOND PLACE IS FIRST LOSER" deathmatch is completely foreign to them
If a kid's experience of youth sports was RUINED because they didn't win--which is the subtext of every "Trans athletes are DESTROYING sports" story--then maybe youth sports aren't serving all the kids who don't win (which is most of them) very well at all?