Numpties – Page 2 – Wis[s]e Words

That Lilo & Stich discourse: racism wrapped up in ‘woke’ language

Published on April 30, 2020Leave a comment

Somebody having a real normal one about Lilo & Stitch:

Apparantly Lilo is a brat and an abuser for being angry and upset her parents have died

Now while this may read like tumblresque pseudowokeness, it turns out the writer is a rightwing creep who wants to keep children in cages. But it gets worse. In a follow-up post their friend describes how the movie isn’t Hawaiian enough because it doesn’t engage with the anti-white racism supposedly rife in Hawaii:

The absolute worst example of this was using Myrtle as a bully figure. The 1970’s were the peak of the Kill Haole Day tradition in Hawaiian schools, something you won’t find in any textbook, but any true Hawaiian knows about. You’ll also find a lot of non-natives that claim “Kill Haole Day” is fake, or an urban legend. My Mom had the broken arms and black eyes to prove it. She was a 2-time State Championship paddler for the Outrigger Canoe Club, and a Punahou school athletic scholar (yes, the same Punahou that President Obama attended). Definitely not your cliché tourist caricature. A ginger haole girl like Myrtle would have been getting her teeth kicked in on the regular, so to see her picking on a local girl is about as ridiculous as a mouse taking down a cat. Funny gag for the general public, insultingly deaf for any local, especially kama’aina.

All of which is nonsense of course. These certified brain geniuses are so smart they completely miss that Lilo & Stitch is set in the present, not the seventies, then go off how it’s not an accurate portrayal of 70s Hawaii because of lies their mum told them about being bullied for being white. Note that the tumblr post actually uses a slur for native Hawaiian people as well, just in case you thought this criticism wasn’t rooted in racism.

As we all know, rightwingers are forever taking left language and twist it to dress up racism, sexism or transphobia in appropriate language, but this is the first time I’ve seen it used so unconsciously. These are Tumblr children, using Tumblr’s language and doing so unironically. It’s just that they use that language to describe rightwing bogey men.

So in the original tweet Lilo is called a bully, abusive and the moral of “family means nobody gets left behind” is twisted to mean abusers should be forgiven. But while that sounds vaguely woke, their real concern is about ‘responsibility’, pretty much always a rightwing shibboleth. Lilo, a six year old child who has lost her parents not long before the story starts, is held entirely responsible for acting out, with no regard to her circumstances. No empathy whatsover, no acknowledgment of what had happened to her, just cold condemnation dressed up as social justice.

Needless to say her opinions got a bit of a backlash and she ultimately deleted her tweets about it, though still blocks everyone that mentions them to her. Typical.

Knew he was a plastic

Published on May 1, 2015Leave a comment

Imagine wanting new experiences as a sf reader!

Published on February 12, 2014Leave a comment

So Alex Dally MacFarlane started a series on gender diversity in science fiction which some obnoxious little wankstain “author” called Larry Correia took exception to, whose nonsense was aptly but slightly more charitably than I would’ve done dissected by everbody’s science fiction pinup, Jim C. Hines. The gist of Correia’s ranting was that nobody was interested in all that gender nonsense and it was all political correctness and message writing and people want story, not strange queer or agender people in their fiction, anyway, you know the type.

Basically what he seems to say is that only white straight men read science fiction and they don’t want to read about anybody else but themselves, because the familiar is truely what you read sf for. Well, Ria off off Bibliotropic is here to set him straight (heh) on the first part:

I love opening a book and sinking into the story and discovering that a character is like me. Whether that means they’re asexual or agendered or just have a weakness for knitting with cashmere yarn, it’s a little bright light that goes on, a link between me and the person whose story I am following, and it makes me want to read about them even more. It’s a very selfish impulse to want to read about people in whom I can see myself reflected.

But that doesn’t make it a bad thing. It makes the character real, because I am real. It makes them a person, because I am a person. It means they have no point, because I have no point, but why should that mean that I and everything about me should disappear for the comfort of people who already have far more options to see themselves reflected in the pages of the novels they read? My existence doesn’t depend on someone learning a lesson from me. I am not an after-school special.

And I’ll set him straight on the second. You know, these days I not only reading science fiction that doesn’t feature the kind of protagonist I can see in the mirror, but actively seek it out. I bought Ascension because its cover featured a black woman; heck, this is my FemShep. Why? Not out of some poofaced desire to know what it would be like to be a black woman in the future, that would be slightly offensive, but because it’s fun, it’s interesting to read the adventures of somebody who isn’t you.

And that’s something people like Correia just can’t understand, that people can be genuinely interested in post-binary gender, even if they’re not personally involved in it. Which is just sad for a science fiction writer.

Can’t have those nurses smoking; bad PR you see

Published on November 27, 2013Leave a comment

The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (not so NICE) wants hsopitals to ban smoking completely:

“We need to end the terrible spectacle of people on drips in hospital gowns smoking outside hospital entrances,” said Professor Mike Kelly, director of Nice’s centre for public health, which drew up the new guidance. It is a “contradiction” for the NHS, which spends £2.7bn a year treating smoking-related ilnesses, to let patients smoke and not do everything it can to wean them off their habit, he added.

It’s the smug classicism that puts the particularly rancid icing on this shit cake. There’s a place and time to get people to stop smoking and it’s not when they’re stressed out, tired and hurting in hospital. Removing smoking shelters from your hospital won’t stop people smoking, it just means that they smoke outside in the wind and rain. Sometimes there are worse problems than having people smoke, for example being a smug condscending prick who wants to take away what little pleasure people can get in hospital.

Reading this made me so angry because I’ve been there with Sandra when the VU hospital decided — over Christmas — to shut down their indoor smoking rooms because some cow took offence to them, so she had to trundle outside into the cold, in her wheelchair (or bed even) to get about the only bit of comfort she had during the two years she had to spent in hospital.

Mind you, it would get worse for the staff:

Under the proposals hospitals’ entire grounds would become non-smoking areas, smoking shelters would be banned and staff contracts would forbid them from “smoking during work hours or when recognisable as an employee, for example when in uniform or wearing identification or handling hospital business”.

This really is the enforcement of a priggish morality under the guise of health concerns, because why else would you be bothered by people smoking in uniform? NHS staff isn’t paid nearly enough to be this kind of role model.

Gary McCoy shows how shitty cartoonists can find work too

Published on September 10, 2012Leave a comment

It must be hard to be a rightwing cartoonist trying to cover the Democratic convention. Your Democratic and neutral counterpart had a field day with Clint Eastwood’s senior moment talking to an empty chair doing his best grandpa Simpson imitation, but what can you make fun off? Sure, there’s Clinton, but we’ve all long since grown tired of cigar jokes. So what else can you do but lie?

Another hilarious Gary McCoy cartoon about Sandra Fluke

It’s not the first time shitty cartoonist Gary McCoy went after Sandra Fluke, nor the first time he lied about what she said, how she looks or what her intentions are. Just watch her short speech, less than seven minutes and see if you can find out how McCoy goes from that to what he shows in his cartoon. That’s what you have to do if you have no talent but a burning desire to bless the world with your shitty opinions: lie, bear false witnes, iterate.