Thorns

I had a bit of an epiphany last night. I've seen a lot of complaints from WOC, disabled people etc about being treated as "add ons" to feminism, which has as a default the needs and experiences of white middle class western women. I'm sympathetic to these claims but always felt I was missing something.
( And then I got it. At least a bit )

Man, there are so many good links on and coming out of ibarw.

Anyway: Anyone who's interesting in Steampunk should check out this discussion, since as well as getting somewhat into some of the underlying racism it also has very pretty pictures, plus some cool ideas.

Two IBARW posts about australia: By strangedave and on a similar theme Australia doesn't have racism? (Actually tielan's whole race tag has a lot of interesting stuff)

Also from her lj, and in order to inspire the engaged couples on my flist: Cake Wrecks

I have joined 50books_poc, since it nicely dovetails with my desire to read a wider variety of good books, and be better educated. I have a list of books to reserve at the library, assuming I get around to getting out of the house before it closes...

I had a sudden (probably rather obvious) thought last night: a common tactic of those trying to derail/dismiss discussions about some injustice (from feminism to animal rights and the environment) is "Why are you picking on this one minor injustice A instead of focussing on major injustice B?"
There's a lot of good rebuttals to this, one of which is that the people making this argument almost certainly are doing less to fight injustice B than the person they're criticising.

But I think one motivation for using this argument is: "I am aware that B is a problem, and deep down think I should do more to fix it. This makes me feel guilty. If you are right, and A is also a problem, then I need to feel guilty about that too. And probably lots of other stuff. And I don't feel like feeling even more bad! Life is hard enough as it is!" Which isn't a very good argument, but it isn't deliberately trolling either, just...selfish I guess.

(I decided this post was too chatty and vague to count towards IBARW)

So I've read a bunch of online fannish arguments where people go "These sorts of fans are crazy" and give examples, and then talk about the way fans should actually think, and end up conflating "Crazy fans" and "People whose attitudes are rational, but different to mine". And I had thought about where one should draw the line.
( Some of these things are not like the others... )