Anyone else noticed: Engaging properly in debate is hard for some without false lazy stereotyping?

CalmNudes said

Ah. Spin off from a locked thread.   That one seemed leap from "Does the media assemble unrealistic combinations of people in order to to represent every possible demographic exactly once?", to "if you notice the demographics or have a view on realistic combinations that is one or more nasty -isms at work".  

It is increasingly difficult to have a debate without

• someone accusing someone else of having views which are group-ist, or a nasty-ism.
• someone accusing someone else of being woke (often because they made accusations of group-ism)
• someone accusing someone else of virtual signalling
• someone asserting their God-given right to behave an unreasonable or unpleasant way
• someone insisting that anyone who doesn't behave in a way they approve of has forfeited some right or set of rights (and the more niche the behaviour the greater the loss of rights)  
• someone insisting that something ordinary is actually a conspiracy against them. 

Whilst a recent thread on the boundaries for the use of "Girl" to describe someone (I'm trying to get people to use "to girl" as a verb in this context as in "he girls every female he deals with")  was interesting it had all of these. And I find on some subjects people I would agree with can't make their point without falling into one of those.  

Yep :(

Stu H said

Sometimes I miss the days of vanbrighaus et all.

The forums of even 5 years ago were so much a different place than today.

General Politics was considered such a hotbed of wrath and slime that it was taken off the main fora and placed in its own little section.

Now... its a ghost of what it was.

But that's echoed throught the forums ... lively discussion is quite rare; new threads are rare; models - once a lively and welcome (who can forget the likes of RaraGoesRoar for example) - now rare and their input is stamped on rather quickly.

The forums in general are a slither of the shadow they used to be.

Exactly :(

Aardvark🎯VonEssfolk said

Stu H said

Sometimes I miss the days of vanbrighaus et all.

The forums of even 5 years ago were so much a different place than today.

General Politics was considered such a hotbed of wrath and slime that it was taken off the main fora and placed in its own little section.

Now... its a ghost of what it was.

But that's echoed throught the forums ... lively discussion is quite rare; new threads are rare; models - once a lively and welcome (who can forget the likes of RaraGoesRoar for example) - now rare and their input is stamped on rather quickly.

The forums in general are a slither of the shadow they used to be.

Exactly :(

Actually ... the forums and political or even general discussions about anything = so tame and rather sanitised and pathetic vs 'those days'

I miss the best parts of those days (but enjoy the fact that the forums are now less of a place 'for a fight for the sake of it')

Aardvark🎯VonEssfolk said

Holly Alexander said

ADWsPhotos it's a photography/model etc portfolio site, why would it be a place for serious debates? I'm sure there are loads of places on the internet for that.

I think it should be an even kinder, nicer, more enjoyable place for creatives to network :)

When you are a world away from the very prolific model shoot period (all TFI btw) that you enjoyed some 10 to15 years ago ... the social and 'banter' and random debate opportunities (and entertainment factor) on Purpleport fora ... end up being an important and key factor in renewing your annual membership subscription.

Total honesty from me there.

The forums are inhabited by the minority, most models I've shot with don't go anywhere near the forums, it's a waste of their time. Russ could bin the forums it wouldn't make any difference to site income. 

Whenever I read “The forums aren’t like they used to be”, all I see is, “I’m old and can’t adapt” or “Everyone used to be like me and now there are others who aren’t like me”.

AndiM said

Whenever I read “The forums aren’t like they used to be”, all I see is, “I’m old and can’t adapt” or “Everyone used to be like me and now there are others who aren’t like me”.

Yeah, I jump to a lot of wrong conclusions as well.  And whenever I read "Whenever I read..."  I know what to expect. 

AndiM said

Whenever I read “The forums aren’t like they used to be”, all I see is, “I’m old and can’t adapt” or “Everyone used to be like me and now there are others who aren’t like me”.

The forums aren't like they used to be.

There is significantly less engagement from all sides, and what little engagement there is, quickly fizzes out.

There is less communication between members of all groups, and what communication there is, quickly dissolves into snide back-biting and veiled attacks or the threads die after a small number of pages.

Share A Shoot, Single Image Critique and Portfolio Review used to be the busiest forums - and now look at them. 

Virtually empty.

This website used to be a thriving online community where social discourse happened; I would say that the forums are *less* friendly now ... And that's a bad thing.

Personally, I'd rather *not* adapt to this current inhospitable, unfriendly way of being online, and would much prefer a return to the era where people communicated.

YMMD 

“ By your 'ilk' ... I meant someone who is looking to be offended / be offended on behalf of someone else (often who wasn't actually offended) / someone with an ethnicity, gender or sexual preference or even just a lifestyle choice that thinks everyone is against them and has a totally distorted sense of reality.”

That was part of a comment from someone who had taken offence at an inoffensive TV ad and then thrown in all the usual woke tropes to justify their outrage and slag the BBC whilst hailing the one true GBeebies.

I found the irony overwhelming :)

RHM.Photo said

I found the irony overwhelming :)

Me too - on all sides.  There's an awful lot of kettles and pots in these discussions! :-)

Kevin Connery said

Nothing new, really. Extremists of all flavors have always had a worldview that was sufficiently skewed that the same words have sufficiently different meanings as to make any real conversations--much less debate--between one extremist and another on the opposite end of the scale impractical or impossible. Someone who believes, for example, that the world is flat isn't going to have a productive discussion with someone who thinks it's roughly spherical. That hasn't changed. 

What has changed is that the normal distribution (the bell curve) of positions/worldviews/beliefs appears to have inverted: there seems to be more people at the far ends of each spectrum than in the center. That applies for most spectrum you can imagine, whether political, social, economic, or any other belief system (not the reality, but beliefs). The internet has exacerbated this in general; while the potential for exposure to a very broad and diverse discussion is present, what appears to be far more common is that most people find a group that believes what/how they believe, and that's their 'normal'. Whether it's centrist or extremist. Since everyone they know believes such-and-so, anyone who doesn't think that way gets lumped into a box labeled extremist, and thus dismissed out of hand.

The most thoughtful comment so far, methinks.  Welcome to the world of the social media echo chamber!  :-(

AndiM said

Whenever I read “The forums aren’t like they used to be”, all I see is, “I’m old and can’t adapt” or “Everyone used to be like me and now there are others who aren’t like me”.

Nostalgia ain't what it used to be.

RHM.Photo said

“ By your 'ilk' ... I meant someone who is looking to be offended / be offended on behalf of someone else (often who wasn't actually offended) / someone with an ethnicity, gender or sexual preference or even just a lifestyle choice that thinks everyone is against them and has a totally distorted sense of reality.”

That was part of a comment from someone who had taken offence at an inoffensive TV ad and then thrown in all the usual woke tropes to justify their outrage and slag the BBC whilst hailing the one true GBeebies.

I found the irony overwhelming :)

Hang on.... Was that thread where someone said the amount of "box ticking" was getting to them, that there seemed to be a rule that any group had to include a Jew, a Muslim and a Hindu, someone of African , South Asian, and East Asian heritage, one person with an obvious physical disability, a gay man or a lesbian woman (or both), and someone who was either trans-gender , or did not consistently identify with a single gender. etc... 

I've heard black people say they grew up in a world where there was no one like them on TV; there was a great thing about Russel T Davis on TV last week and he said there were no gay characters on TV in his youth - he's cast a gay actor as the first black Doctor in Doctor Who; when that was first on TV in 1963 (it went out the week Kennedy was shot) gay men were still imprisoned, and it takes time for TV etc to reflect society.  I don't think I'm woke for saying it's a good thing to have central characters who aren't all middle-aged, middle class , straight, able-bodied white men. (Vigil these last few weeks had a lesbian central character and didn't hide it nor over emphasise it - IMHO the perfect way of saying 'people who are different from you do all the normal things anyone else does'. And why should Time Lords always regenerate into the same apparent gender and skin colour ? ) As a middle-aged, middle class , straight, able-bodied white man I don't need all the roles on TV to look like me, I can spare some, and in the name of not having people grow up thinking "there's no one like me on TV" spare a few more to over representing minorities isn't automatically a bad thing.    

I've worked with and socialised with people in just about all the categories I mentioned. But I can't think of anywhere where I've met them all at the same time.
If the commissioning editors said "Oh yes, it's great that we have Black detective (Luther) but there really he needs to have a gay sergeant working for him, and his boss needs to be an Indian woman" we might question the realism of that. Hasn't that just broken the rule of having someone who isn't in every majority box demographically doing ordinary things in normal situations. (Using Doctor Who again, giving Jodie Whittaker's Doctor a black companion, his white father (or step father), an a South Asian character who has seems to have a girl crush on the now-female Doctor is overloading it a bit, OK they're zipping round time an space in a box that is bigger on the inside so perhaps rules of realism don't apply, but I wanted to be entertained and I got a sermon instead). 

Personally I've got no time for people who devote their lives being offended at stuff, and that includes people offended at "wokeness". 

CalmNudes I spoke to my partner about this the other day. How I had no characters that looked like me and to him it wasn’t an issue and he couldn’t understand until we delved further and he realised I didn’t get the same childhood memories and happiness from programmes and movies in the way my white friends/family did.

It really does hurt no one to include more diversity!

instead of diversity quotas or box ticking, could it be done in a mathematical way that reflects the society?

although before that is taken too seriously, time for something truly controversial, how about getting back to a meritocracy? 

someone's PP page was pointed out for not being diverse enough, well what if a photographer chose to only work with the top 1% of PP models?

side note, i'm not a Dr Who fan, never watched a single episode, so what i'm really looking for is some accuracy (regarding a fictional character), i understand the Dr is a timeless entity, possibly not even human, can take on whatever form, recently the Dr was a Woman, then a Black man.  at the times it happened it seemed conveniently box ticking, no?

Σ OI Σ said

instead of diversity quotas or box ticking, could it be done in a mathematical way that reflects the society?

although before that is taken too seriously, time for something truly controversial, how about getting back to a meritocracy? 

someone's PP page was pointed out for not being diverse enough, well what if a photographer chose to only work with the top 1% of PP models?

side note, i'm not a Dr Who fan, never watched a single episode, so what i'm really looking for is some accuracy (regarding a fictional character), i understand the Dr is a timeless entity, possibly not even human, can take on whatever form, recently the Dr was a Woman, then a Black man.  at the times it happened it seemed conveniently box ticking, no?

Bit in bold I was about go "WTF" before I saw the irony. 

What people shoot on PP isn't trying to reflect society. But why should there be an upper age limit, or dress size limit for being included in the "top" models. 

As for Doctor Who... as convenient way of explaining how different actors could play the same person, Time Lords regenerate, with a different body come personality changes too. For the first 55 years the Doctor was white and male. But when the Doctor went back to his home planet we saw that time Lords could be any skin colour and some looked female. Back when Tom Baker was playing the Doctor he had a "Time Lady" as a companion. Traditionally the Doctor had one companion, female, from earth, young and never close to his equal - female equals were few and far between. (Eddie Izzard had a routine about their stock line being "Doctor Doctor I've been captured...") Could time Lords change skin colour and gender ? Why not ? Personally I don't see anything wrong with "this time the Doctor's generated into an old white man... this time a younger woman, now - wtf she's rolled back to what he looked like 3 versions ago! - and now that version's split and his skin changed colour...". 
Yes, you're right that "Who The Doctor is this time" can become a game of box ticking, and some people will complain that it is. To me the Doctor can be anything, but it gets preachy when the Doctor's companions are trying to represent everything and they gave Whitaker's Doctor a one-of-everything companion list.    

During the winter we typically get out the DVD of the Kenneth Branagh's Much Ado About Nothing - people return after having fought for the "Duke", who is played be Denzel Washington. The Duke's black, and a long line of white guys fought for him in 16th century Italy... but OK why not.  But then his brother decides to make a stir, and the brother is played by Keanu Reaves, and every time I watch it I think "how come the black duke has a white brother..." surely they could have given Washington a role which didn't have a brother or cast a black actor as the brother. It seems like American money to make the film demanded a black name, to tick a box, but not a second one to make the presence of the first make sense. So really Washington is "token black guy", and I'd rather watch something like Luther were the main character could be anything but is played by a black guy, than something where someone looked at the cast at the last moment and says "can we change this for a [member of some group we need to represent]". One's inclusive and realistic, one's tokenism and not.