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This morning I started noticing a few hits coming from an anime blog called Cry More. The author Dark_Sage has put together a comprehensive list of anime blogs, and no doubt went to a lot of effort to do so.
This is commendable, what isn’t as commendable are Dark_Sage’s attempts to be clever when describing the blogs on the list.
NB: I’m using screenshots rather than links here.
I’ll start with “Shitty episodic reviews”. I can understand not being particularly fond of this style of anime blogging, but that doesn’t mean that every blog that does this is automatically “shitty”. This is unnecessary rudeness at best.
Next up is describing Beneath the Tangles (and several others) as “Christian Propaganda”. Now I’m (at most) agnostic, and sometimes I do skim lightly over what is written on Beneath the Tangles, but there’s no doubt that the beliefs held there are genuine. Once again this is purely rude.
Then we have a couple of sites described as “anime reviews for old people”. I don’t know how Pirates of the Burley Griffin dodged that one given that I’ve been an anime fan for over twenty years now, but I’m sure Dark_Sage will correct that absence of rudeness shortly.
Then there’s this utterly sexist slur on Gagging on Sexism:
I commented about this but limited myself to calling the descriptions harsh.
To which the response was, charitably, an attempt to be clever.
There are two points that need to be made here. The first was admirably stated by General David Morrison in the video below: “The standard you walk past is the standard you accept.”
I do not accept the standard set by Dark_Sage.
The second point is one made by John Scalzi that: The failure mode of clever is “asshole”.
I don’t see Dark_Sage’s comment that “it would be immoral to propagate your PC privilege” (or the other response) as clever, I see it as being an asshole.
As soon as this post goes up I will be replying with a request to be removed from the list.
I do not want to be associated with this sort of behaviour.
Pirates of the Burley Griffin 
I love how privilege is now a word people can just throw around without understanding what it means.
Grant: That’s pretty much the size of it.
Oh look: this post has mysteriously acquired a one star rating today just like all of my recent posts. I wonder who could POSSIBLY be doing that. 🙂
To be fair though I don’t think I fully understand the implications of privilege either. I’m honestly not sure how far past “lowest difficulty setting” I’ve gotten sometimes.
OTOH I have gotten “lowest difficulty setting”, which puts me ahead of that specific usage by Dark_Sage.
I… mostly just find the list odd, I think. Why spend so much time (seriously, that list must have taken ages to complete) creating something that the author has such obvious disdain for? I can’t even figure out if he/she hates anime, or if it’s purely a blog hate thing.
It is a bit odd in that way, and I can’t see a reason for the negative comments other than trying (and failing IMO) to be clever.
So much anger, so little love. I just wanted to help people out with my list and here you are, slandering me for it with mean words like “asshole”, “rude”, and “who”.
You’re taking your male outrage privilege too far, and I would like you to apologize.
There is just so much that is wrong here.
I will start with the double standard that apparently:
a) Expressing an opinion that your comments are rude and the behaviour of an asshole is defamatory; BUT
b) Describing a blog as “shitty episodic reviews” or “Christian propaganda” is NOT defamatory.
Either both sets of statements are defamatory, or neither set is.
I may ask Ken White at http://www.popehat.com/ for his opinion, but my belief is that neither set of opinions are defamatory.
You have the right to make the statements you made (with one possible exception), I have the right to call them out as inappropriate should I believe that they are sexist, bigoted, or simply rude.
The only comment in either blog post that I think MIGHT be defamatory is your comment re Gagging on Sexism. Obviously I’m not a lawyer, but you might want to check into that.
Third, if all you wanted was to help people then why make the negative comments in the first place? How does that help the bloggers on the receiving end of the negative comments?
Finally is “male outrage privilege”. About all the response that deserves is “bwahahahaha!”. I have to admit that I’m posting your comment unedited because I expect that line to generate considerable amusement.
More importantly it reveals, as Grant suggested in his earlier comment, that you simply don’t understand the concept of privilege at all.
[Deleted for stupidly offensive use of triggering language. JS]
Censorship is the sad admittance that your ideas can’t stand the scrutiny of logic. I find it rather pathetic that’s the way you’ve decided to take this enlightening debate, but so be it.
May you continue to be euphoric in your cis male privilege.
Please see the comment policy in the Site Disclaimer.
NB: I have now updated the Site Disclaimer to explicitly handle triggering material, both by myself in posts and by others in comments.
Now this one I’ll allow through with a note that moderation is not censorship. You carelessly used triggering language that I’m not prepared to allow here.
I am not the Australian government, let alone the US government.
You have no right to freedom of speech here, nor do I have a right to freedom of speech on your blog.
Yes, this DOES mean that you have an absolute right to edit or remove the comments I left on your blog.
Yes, I’m being logically and morally consistent here. Surprise!
For more information you might wish to read this:
http://whatever.scalzi.com/2008/07/25/another-entry-in-the-annals-of-people-who-havent-the-slightest-idea-what-theyre-saying/
Or perhaps this:
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2008/06/moderation_policy.html
Am I the only one who read Sage’s last comment in Comic Book Guy’s voice?
Well I didn’t but that’s probably down to ignorance of Comic Book Guy on my part. 🙂
Oh, and thanks for the reply on twitter.
Yeah, he went too far with certain blog descriptions. You’re right to call him out on it. Preferable, though it would have stilled deflated the sails of the poor bloggers, would have been to use a scale of ten. Otherwise, that was a commendable effort to catalogue anime blogs.
Though, I will confess that sites having good episode by episode reviews–a kind of blogging I myself refuse to attempt due to the extreme difficulty of keeping each article interesting and staying motivated to write them–to be very hard to find. Still, one can be more constructive in the criticism one levels at the poor writing stiffs.
Thanks.
A score out of 10 would have been better, but would have taken much more work to do properly. Then again, and being fair to Dark_Sage, there’s plenty of evidence that he’s prepared to do the work.
Good episodic reviews are indeed hard, that’s why I tend to limit them to shows that I am a big fan of.
Dark_Sage.
The claim that my ideas don’t stand up to logic is quite amusing.
1. Your first claim that I slandered you was an egregious double standard (and also wrong).
2. You claimed that moderation was censorship which is a) Also Wrong and b) Another double standard again since my first comment on your blog was also subject to moderation (as are all subsequent comments should you choose to do so)
3. Calling out male privilege such as the language in the comment I deleted, or in your description of Gagging on Sexism, is NOT exercising male privilege.
4. At no stage have you actually challenged the core idea of my post: that the blog descriptions in your otherwise excellent anime blog list were needlessly rude, bigoted, or sexist.
Would you care to try again?
This made my day.
John, I commend you for this post.
But just ignore the bastard. He’s just trolling for fun
Thanks for that.
Re the trolling: that’s why he’s gone back into the moderation queue.
In the event that he posts a comment with valid points, and that doesn’t use triggering language, I’ll let it out to play with the nice people.
I sorta take those comments of “Christian Propaganda” and such as tongue-in-cheek, but I an not a reader of that blog to know for sure.
One such type of comment I could possibly accept as a tongue-in-cheek attempt to be clever.
Once there are three different types of gratuitous nastiness, and one that is purely vicious, it is a pattern setting a standard that I can’t accept or be voluntarily associated with.
Apparently Dark Sage is also running some sort of “aniblog tournament” that blogs are simply entered into with no option to withdraw.
I’m not particularly impressed by that behaviour either, but at least it’s consistent with the list itself.
Overall this is a pity given the hard work that went into preparing the list, and that running this “tournament” is likely to be. I regard that much of Dark Sage’s efforts as being admirable and worthy of respect.
I don’t know how I missed this post the first time around…
At this point I’m happy to let things lie where they are.
I haven’t heard or seen anything on this topic for months, and I’m not that eager to pick a fight on the internet.
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