dolorosa_12: (le guin)
[personal profile] dolorosa_12
I'll return to people's suggested prompts in future Friday open threads, but for now I've got a prompt of my own. This one's pretty straightforward: what is something you've read recently online that made you think, that resonated with you, or that taught you something interesting.

A couple of requests: please, nothing to do with the ongoing US election shitshow (I've driven myself into a frenzy of sleepless panic worrying about the situation in specific states, and I really need to focus on something else), and if possible I would prefer whatever you share here to be written text rather than podcasts or videos. If you prefer to share videos/podcasts, that's fine, but be aware that it's extremely unlikely I'll watch/listen to them — I find them an extremely inefficient way to absorb information and if there's not a written transcript, I generally avoid them as a medium.



My link is this blog post: The Uncanny Valley of Culture. On the surface, it's about two pieces of media — an Australian film, and an Australian game, neither of which I've seen/played — but what it's really about is the kind of critical obliviousness which occurs when critics come from a hegemonic culture:

[W]hat we really truly need is for tastemakers and critics (particularly American ones) to put more effort into leading the way in championing narratives from other cultures, and to drop the assumptions that all English-speaking countries exist in a kind of bland monoculture: tastemakers’ horizons must be broadened, for everyone’s sake.

I found it very persuasive.

Date: 2020-11-20 06:08 pm (UTC)
eglantiere: (Default)
From: [personal profile] eglantiere
what i got out of this article, which might or might not be what author had put in there, is that empathy, when applied willy-nilly, does not replace, mm, ethics? that when empathy is applied within the bigger context of oppression and injustice, turns into excuses for the oppressors and safely toothless misery porn for the oppressed. i think the short story tries to save its main character with empathy - the author keeps trying to make them more and more relatable, safe, harmless, good, engaging, pitiful, virtuous (i.e. easy to empathize with) - while it's in general not right that you should only not harm somebody if you empathize with them; you should not harm them because they're human.

Date: 2020-11-21 05:25 am (UTC)
cahn: (Default)
From: [personal profile] cahn
I really like that, and definitely agree with what you're saying. I think... if the article had been called "the limits of empathy" it would have worked better for me, maybe?

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dolorosa_12: (Default)
a million times a trillion more

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