You know what’s counterproductive? Trying to make satire disappear on the Internet because you’re offended by it.
Here’s a chart of my blog hits over the last two days:
Over 12,700 hits just today, and rising. In addition to the 7,000 hits yesterday.
By pitching a hissy fit and insisting my Locus April Fools piece be taken down, the failfandom brigade only ensured that it would be seen by 20 times as many people as would have seen it otherwise.
Emphasis on the “fail.”
Tags: Locus, Media Watch, WisCon
I’ve had a spike as well.
[…] Person, who has posted a copy of the post on his blog, seems to have decided to embrace the whole thing, and has indulged in a bit of traffic statistic victory lapping. […]
This is a battle of wills between principle and identity. If you parse right and wrong through identity you can literally never be wrong. This is why Adria Richards and N.K. Jemisin can whine about racism and lack of diversity in the SF literary and tech community but be completely silent about this:
The Hurston Wright Foundation
Black Writers Alliance Award
Celebration of Black Writing
Black Publishers & Writers Awards
New Voices Award
The Dickerson-Du Bois Undergraduate Award
BCALA Literary Award
Asian American Literature Award
Coretta Scott King Book Awards
The Unpublished Writers Award
Black Mystery Writers Awards
National Council for Black Studies Writing Award
AAMBC Literary Awards
Those are writing awards I can’t win for only one reason – I’m white. Since identity is never wrong, this obvious display of bigotry isn’t. Nevertheless, the fact there are no white literary awards formally organized around race is a stunning oversight for a nation of white racists and xenophobes. Why would PC people be interested in a principle? They’d have to admit they share an intellectual space with a neo-Nazi far more than the imaginary racists they are always crying about. Goose-gander is not high on anyone’s list in the topsy-turvy world of political correctness, and so simple comparisons such as the one above are impossible for them to make or draw proper conclusions from.
funny!
“What is freedom of expression?
Without the freedom to offend,
it ceases to exist.”
Salman Rushdi
By pitching a hissy fit and insisting my Locus April Fools piece be taken down, the failfandom brigade only ensured that it would be seen by 20 times as many people as would have seen it otherwise.
You seem to imply that’s not what some monolithic “they” want.
Part of the idea behind pointing out problems when they exist is so that people know about them, and discuss them, and be aware of them.
Reading the blog comments, for example, may provide me with useful pieces of information — ability to make judgments about people based upon their stated opinions, the company they keep and praise, etc. Without it being pointed out, none of this would have happened.
And, as many people have discovered, in, for example, the last election cycle having attention brought to what they thought were off-the-cuff comments can be a bad thing indeed. Not all publicity is good publicity.
Aaaand 2 months later people are still finding it, pointing and laughing at WisCon.
Nice blog btw. Since you do skiffy humor you might be amused at the cartoon I draw for, Tempest in a Teardrop. No link, because honest to God, I’m not trolling for hits, we just seem to have a similar sense of humor.