pine

Fandom is political. Fandom is international. And politics are international: what happens in each country very much tends to follow the "trends." For all these reasons I urge you to read a UK fan's comments below on their upcoming elections. It happens here too. It happens everywhere.

Consider what privatizing society - taking away public goods so that only wealthy and powerful groups have access - has to do with "net neutrality." How secure is our fannish freedom to say and write and be who we want online? Only as secure as our voices are heard; our votes and opinions must be counted. Do you want Tory-style governments handing over big chunks of the internet to rich commercial customers only? (Think LJ. 6A. Youtube take-downs.) It's not just public parks and women's shelters such governments close down and destroy.

The scene: Britain. The crisis: freedom. Read on:

Of course, we have to hope.
[A signal-boost from Yonmei, c/p by permission; feel free to comment at her journal]

So I hope. That despite everything, we won't end up back in Tory Britain again.

Obviously, there's the pond of homophobia and transphobia lurking under the happy smiling of-course-we-like-LGBT-people face. But that we know: I don't think many LGBT people are likely to be fooled by the Tories.

Johann Hari points out that we can already see what Cameron's vision of "Big Society" looks like in real life: a Conservative council was elected in Hammersmith and Fulham, a model for Conservative government, says George Osborne, who wants to be Chancellor on Friday: they immediately sold off 12 homeless shelters, handing them to large property developers.

The horrified charity Crisis was offered premises by the BBC to house the abandoned in a shelter over the Christmas period at least. The council refused permission. They said the homeless were a "law and order issue", and a shelter would attract undesirables to the area. With this in mind, they changed the rules so that the homeless had to "prove" to a sceptical bureaucracy that they had nowhere else to go – and if they failed, they were turned away. ..... A young woman – let's called her Jane Phillips, because she wants to remain anonymous – turned up at the council's emergency housing office one night, sobbing and shaking. She was eight months pregnant. She explained she was being beaten up by her boyfriend and had finally fled because she was frightened for her unborn child. The council said they would "investigate" her situation to find "proof of homelessness" – but she told them she had nowhere to go while they carried it out. By law, they were required to provide her with emergency shelter. They refused. They suggested she try to find a flat on the private market.

Eight months pregnant, beaten, and terrified, she ended up sleeping in a park for four nights. That's what David Cameron regards as a model of good governance, and I know that I'm preaching to the converted: but that's what the Tories mean when they talk about "Big Society" and people "taking responsibility". They mean that people with a disability so severe they need 24/7 care should start paying the bills - £12.50 per hour. (You do the math. I'll cry.) [US $18.90/hour] And any disabled person assessed as having only 'lower moderate' needs would be totally cut off. Leave people who could have some quality of life with help, rotting abandoned in their homes, if that saves the rich some money.

When I was visiting London in the 1980s, at the height of Tory Britain, I just got used to the plain fact that you'd pass a teenager huddled under a blanket anywhere that was a good begging spot: kids almost my age, who had left home and found that Thatcher's pro-family policies meant they'd get no help at all from any of the agencies supposed to provide for those in need. Over 16, they were legally allowed to leave home: under 18, they weren't entitled to claim benefits of any description. There were so many of them, and I had so little money myself, I used to make formal awkward rules that I would give what I could spare to the first one I passed on any given day, and try not to feel too awful about the next one, and the next, and the next.

It's not just the children who are homeless: There's kids who have homes, but need youth clubs and parks:

Castle Youth Club. It was built in Dickens' time and bequeathed to the local council "to benefit the children of this area for perpetuity". The Conservatives shut it down two years ago to sell it off. The deal fell through, so now it sits empty while the local kids hang around on the streets outside.

Hurlingham Park was a big vibrant patch of green where kids from the local estates could play, and run on one of the few professional running tracks in the country, in a setting so classically beautiful it was used in the film Chariots of Fire. But then the Conservatives were elected. They handed the park over to a large international polo consortium that has ripped out the running track and shut the park down for a month every year – so rich people can watch polo for hundreds of pounds a day. ..... Nick Anderton, a 17-year-old from the local estate. He stares at it sadly and says: "The park is meant to be for everyone, isn't it? But we have to stop our football now so they can get it ready so these people can play polo, and we won't be able to use it for most of the summer ... My friend used to run on the track every day, he wants to be an athlete, but they got rid of it so he can't now ... It feels like we don't have the right to be here any more.

To benefit the children of this area for perpetuity.

Or until a Tory government comes along.


Send this to someone you know in Britain. Remember it for the next election, wherever you are! This signal-boost is of a post by Yonmei, c/p with her permission; feel free to comment at her journal.

ETA to fix html error mistakenly ascribing a ¶ of Yonmei's words to Hari. *facepalm*

So in reading my dwircle I gather that LJ pulled a quick-trick with the code in a way that rather substantially benefited them financially but was pulled quickly after fans got uber-miffed.

Someone linked to LJ user's Kyle_Cassidy's journal for more info on this. The name sounded so familiar I clicked over there to read. Oh! KC is our LJ user rep. I'm still groping for specific memories around that datum point - my LJ files have been have deleted and the rest are slowly trickling out of sight - so I read farther down the comments and see that yes, many are happy that KC is doing a great job (which he kindly thanks them for but demurs, saying he'll be convinced when they get a User Backup function going).

To someone who says UR THE BEST USER REP EVAH he replied:

i think i'm only the second one and, from all i've heard, the first one vanished immediately after being elected.

Oh rly? Hmmm. Izzat so? How'd that go down? I actually recall voting in the first LJ user rep election - or wait, make that both of them - but without remembering either time who that user rep ended up being. Although I also recall being pleased that the best-qualified candidate IMO, the one I voted for, ended up being elected each time. However, these are but tiny floating islands of knowledge in a sea of HUH WHAT HAPPENED?

Enlighten me O clued-in flist. What, in the varied and vocal opinions of fandom, has been the *concrete* outcome(s) of having an LJ user board and user-elected reps?

So Belgium's Kevin van der Perren is skating to Robin Hood (the Michael Kamen score).

Earlier, it was Pirates of the Caribbean, with Spain's young Javier Fernandez doing an awesomely fun, lively interpretation. Worth watching especially for his swaggering drunken-sailor section, in the cutest pirate "boots."

Watching yet another slim young man with dark tousled hair and a sparkling personality take the ice, I wondered... when we'll see a Harry Potter interpretation in the Olympics or worlds. Quidditch, anyone?

An IJ friend is pondering a Snape figure-skating AU. OOOH. We should cheer her on to do this, y/y?

I could really go for a Plushenko!Lupin too.

Also, I need skater icons, I think! Or really, if I'm going to use DW, more icons of any kind.

What do you do after a flaming row? An intemperate remark (or 10)? When the bitter anger of a wank dies down, there is occasionally a fleeting wish that some of it could be unsaid, or at least that you could apologize and agree to move on. Or sometimes, there are things you didn't do - the "sins of omission" - and you wish you could say what you didn't say, and explain why, and apologize, and move on.

quinfirefrorefiddle on Dreamwidth came up with one interesting solution:

meaculpa

Because if we don't move on... we're stuck. Not changing, staying the same, is being stuck, too.

In the aftermath of every fail there are some who wonder, Is fandom getting wankier all the time? What happens when you follow the Geek Social Fallacies too assiduously (or your whole flist seems to) and can no longer be "friends" with anyone who didn't totally agree, jump in on the "right" side, join the drama, care deeply, get the point?

Eventually the only friends you dare have are those who (a) don't talk, (b) don't talk publicly, or (c) are newbies. The friends who don't talk - well, hello? They're gone. The ones who no longer talk online - why stay, then? We're gone. As for those newbies, they will soon go through the same trial-by-fail, resulting in most of *them* becoming polarized or silenced or silencing or walking away from fandom... do the math. It's a never-ending turmoil with smaller and smaller circles of trust, and larger and larger circles of former friends and lifelong enemies.

Woah. This is not my shiny fandom! This is not the online community we say we want! Instead, it's a steadily shrinking space of love and trust and diversity, of civil discourse. It's ever less of the squee, and teh shiny, not to mention my beloved meta. Yes, it's good that fandom becomes ever more aware of important issues - but not if it becomes ever less willing to just *talk*, and resolve them, and move on with an increase in both awareness *and* community. Because dude, regardless of how right the path is, if it goes into the big empty desert without that loaf of bread, jug of wine, and especially *thou* - the rest of the community - it's a lonely, empty place.

Sure, there's that whole "different drummer" shtick, taking "the less travelled path". But there's also the old "No woman is an island." It reminds us "for whom the bell tolls": it's for *us*. That death knell always, in some way, signals a loss from our community. Because hey, we are social animals, and if we can't take care of each other? We die a little inside. Sometimes social animals, cut off from healthy community, just die.

This web 2.0, this fandom, our shiny jewel in the online sea, this splintered isle - it's no good if we can't learn how to get along.

Sometimes, you want to say you're sorry for your actions or inactions, for words spoken or unspoken, information divulged or topics shied away from. This can be regardless of whether the others involved are interested in dialogue or forgiveness. Sometimes, *you* need to make an apology for your karma or serenity, your self-respect or sense of closure or whatever.

( Here's a way )

So ithiliana over on LJ was asking who impudently dubbed this the PervySurveyFail. *raises hand reluctantly*

Oh, but she liked it! Well... in that case. *is inspired* Also, IZ NOT TL;DR TODAY, JUST BAD RHYME!

Remember Mother Goose and "Georgie-Porgie, pudding and pie"?

I give you:

"Pervy Ogi"

PervySurvy, Ogi and Sai,
Polled the fans but told a lie.
When they asked about the fail,
Pervy Ogi started to bail.
When the fangirls came to play
PervySurvy ran away.

LIKE? WANT MOAR? WRITE SUM PLZ!!!

Dreamwidth sheep are ... dreamy. Or alien or vampires or state flags or anything you like - if you see it and share it at dreamsheep.

Go on, don't be sheepish. Hoof it on over there and gather yourself a little flock of Dreamsheep icons. Better yet, make and share some ... and enter the contest!