Personal feelings aren’t really what this blog is about, so I stay well away from blogger politics and arguments. However, there’s a spat going on at the moment that I have to weigh in on, because I think the wrong side of it is getting a lot of undeserved sympathy and attention.

This is partly about the recent Kathy Sierra thing, and given that it involved death threats there are some pretty serious issues there. Tim O’Reilly’s code of conduct is also a misguided effort I’ll talk about elsewhere. Plenty of worthy stuff to go at in the NYT article, but there was one thing that really doesn’t belong there: A link to, and interview with, Dooce.

Violent Acres got an oblique mention, and on a couple of occasions recently I’ve seen it referred to as a hate blog. There’s so much earnest worry flying around over just how mean V is sometimes that I have something to say to the concerned:

Fuck you for being so weak.

Not kitten-like, vulnerable weakness, nor the beaten and eroded by your surroundings kind of weak. Berating people for those kinds is contemptible.

On the periphery of all these wars of words, and at the centre of some, is a very different kind of weakness. Complacent, self indugent weakness. It’s the weakness of habitual victims. You’re worried about mean words? They’re hard to deal with? V is talking about you, saying mean things and sometimes even pointing out your hypocrisy. Not threatening you. Let’s take a quick tour of adversity:

A girl ran away to Belfast on her own, 16 years old in the mid ’70s. She ended up married to a paramilitary member who beat her, and on one notable occasion had body parts bounce off her living room window during a bombing.

A man had difficulty dealing with just how many people he’d killed in the Falklands, and later commited suicide because it seemed like the only other option to the violent life he’d slipped into during the two decades since he’d been out of the armed forces.

Sometimes archaic scriptural laws requiring two witnesses to come forward before any action can be taken on an issue cause paedophilia to be concealed and ignored in a religious community. Meanwhile, a local old boys network means some old scumbag remains in a position of power, groping and seducing with impunity while his victims are punished and ostracised for “immorality”. Sometimes parents in the same community will also let their kids die in hospital because they think blood transfusions are wrong.

Sometimes an 8 year old boy rapes a 5 year old girl and an entire community ignores it, partly because they didn’t even know it was possible until that point, but mostly because they’re weak.

These are things I’ve seen and people I’ve known.

One more example. Yes, even in the most affluent societies, sometimes parents are so evil that they will keep a child locked in a bare room. It’s been documented a number of times, and if done very early in the life of a child, they fail to develop any kind of language or socialisation, and, to all intents and purposes, become feral.

The “fuck you” stands. If words are something you have trouble dealing with, mommybloggers, then I have a big bag of mean for you and I always will. The words at Violent Acres are a fraction of what your kids will be dealing with one day, when their classmates get hold of yours.

I’ve had reservations over the value of her posts during the more singularly provocative ones, but a link to V stays in my sidebar. The reason for so very few blogs being there is partly because humongous blogrolls are meaningless and noisy, but more importantly, because I think the seven people there all tend to say significant things. They’re more than entertainment.

Entertainment is largely sterile fluff. The vital characteristic of the most meaningful art, documentary, reportage, and story telling is they they are not sanitised. They look at the edge of culture and take a good poke at our weak spots. By refusing to accomodate squeamishness, they make us stronger, they enlighten us rather than breeding complacency. They open up new things, rather than bolstering what’s already there. They cause us to think rather than wallow. They bring things to light. They enable people to deal with stuff instead of merely coping.

Comic, novel, blog, newspaper, film, song; in every form of media there will always be content you disagree with. It may not taste nice, it may not make you feel warm and fuzzy inside, it may not give you a sugar rush or a sense of achievement, but ye gods is it good for you. Chow down motherfuckers.

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 14th, 2007 at 13:37 and is filed under About, Conflict, Culture, Media, Privacy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.