Been Scrolling Through Fanfiction, As One Does In Their Spare Time, And I've Noticed An Interesting Trend

Been scrolling through fanfiction, as one does in their spare time, and I've noticed an interesting trend when you get outside characters to punish the 'morally repugnant'. Could be historical, could be the dead, could be a character from another fandom. But it never fits with their crimes.

And I'm not talking about people punishing a genocidal dictator or a rapist or someone who is canonically evil in the original source material, I'm speaking of people who were negligent but still on the side of good. People who are flawed, yes, and those flaws sometimes endanger those around them, but ultimately do the right thing.

And some writers go way over the top that they justify monstrous crimes for 'trusting one person too much' or 'not listening to something frankly outrageous' or 'not fighting hard enough against a person in power'.

I want to clarify, no hate to the writers. Rage fantasies are entirely okay and can be beneficial. I'm not saying that type of content doesn't have a place.

But it's a trend I've noticed, and it's really annoying when I'm trying to find a critique of a character and then read this and see the author's notes where they're all "Yeah, I was going to have them raped/stripped of something intrinsic/tortured/etc., but the other characters need them to not be until they can find an adequate replacement'

Like, good god, we get it. You don't like this character. That doesn't mean your logic isn't disturbing.

I don't know if I'm reading too much into this, but I just find it mildly discomforting. It just gets extreme, ya know? And the actual monsters in canon and in the fanfic, get at most a "then this amazing avenger of justice killed them" in the first couple of lines. And it's, disappointing, I guess. It boils complex characters and situations and relationships into "this ones bad and this ones good"

Can we boost this one until it reaches the Oklahoma City Tumblrites? This seems like something this website could rally and solve. Help save all this genetic information? I messaged them to offer to consult with the entymology lab near mine to see if they could store the bugs with us, but they are VERY far away and would have to drive long distance to us.

I made this, please feel free to use

reblog to send three ghosts after elon musk

I think a major part is that we're often taught the opposite, that our opinion is insignificant. I got penalized on several of my highschool essays for trying to synthesize because I couldn't fit all my thoughts and analysis within a certain page limit. The best score I got was when I gave up and did what they wanted. They didn't want my insight, they wanted me to format it properly.

I wasn't rewarded for expressing my insight, so eventually I did the most barebones work.

And that's what got me a B.

I teach a lot of undergrads these days. About 3 years ago, I started dedicating a full two hours early every semester to a lecture and discussion about the history of the concept of plagiarism, because I was so annoyed that my students were walking into my classroom with the ironclad belief that they weren't plagiarizing when they were. Sure, the university had some official plagiarism guidelines that they could hypothetically read in a code of conduct somewhere, but they didn't. All they had was a vague memory of some teacher in Grade 8 telling them 'don't copy and paste from wikipedia' and a little learning from experience afterwards.

My hypothesis (which I was delighted to find is shared by Brian Deer, the journalist who broke the Wakefield story and who was the source Illuminaughti plagiarized in the hbomberguy video) is that the rise of automatic plagiarism checkers meant that, in the minds of many students, the formerly more abstract concept of plagiarism ('passing someone else's work off as your own') became a more concrete concept operationalized by the plagiarism checker. Under this concept, a text is plagiarized if (and, implicitly, only if) it is detected as plagiarism by the plagiarism checker. I have spent many hours with students sobbing in my office after I told them that their essays were plagiarized, and they all say that they thought changing the words around was sufficient to make it not plagiarized. Maybe some of them were lying for sympathy, maybe they all were, but I see no reason to not take them at their word. They think that what they're doing is dubious (hence the shame) but they don't think it falls under what they take to be the definition of plagiarism - the thing they can face sanction from the university for. They need to have it pointed out to them that there has been plagiarism for a lot longer than there have been automatic 'plagiarism checkers' and that as their professor, I'm the only plagiarism checker they really need to be concerned about.

It's really easy for me to get frustrated about this. It's frustrating to me that the American public high school system (the source of the majority of my students) has failed to prepare them to think about information, facts, and where they come from. It's frustrating that students can't be arsed to read the university's code of conduct and that the only way I know they have is if I read it straight to their faces. It's very frustrating to see the written scholarly word, a medium to which I have dedicated no small part of my life, treated like it's not worth anything. I'm frustrated to know that most students are not in my class, or in the class of someone else prepared to teach this lesson, so they'll go through their whole lives thinking that an uncited light paraphrase is enough to be worthy of credit. I'm frustrated that people with such a lax attitude towards information are my fellow voters. I once read a real fucking academic essay that was submitted for grades that cited a long quote from Arthur Conan Doyle that, when I traced it, was actually a quote from a fucking TJLC blog. That one isn't frustrating, I guess, that's just funny. It's not all bad.

I'm glad for the hbomberguy video. I hope it will make it easier to convince my students in future. It's too bad he didn't go into the academic context, but it's not like he was short on things to talk about already.

But this is a more general problem than just the video essay context shows. If we're not careful, the very concept of plagiarism can get eroded. I'm not a linguistic prescriptivist, either! If enough people start taking this new concept as plagiarism, that will be what it becomes. I think a world in which that notion of plagiarism is the relevant one would be a worse world. Don't let people erode the idea of credit. You're going to want it later.

Abso-fucking-lutely

Down with those motherfuckers

TIL that the reason lead levels in children’s blood have dropped 85% in the past thirty years is because of an unknown scientist who fought car companies to end leaded gasoline. He also removed it from paint, suggested its removal from pipes, and campaigned for the removal of lead solder from cans.

via ift.tt