Bah!

love that this caused so much controversy the thread needed to be locked. over chicken sandwich

gang this does not even scratch the surface

Someone posted a picture of a piece of chicken between two hamburger buns titled “Chicken Burger” to /r/food. Another user commented “Chicken Sandwich” on the post, and was slapped with a 30 day ban by the mods. When they responded to ask why, the mod said

“Correcting someone in public is public shaming, on top of being incorrect, it’s a pretty shitty comment to leave.”

So now /r/food is on lockdown after being spammed with posts titled “Chicken Sandwich” and other variations. The mod that handed the ban down pinned a post doubling down, comparing the situation to “Pride posts that always fill up with bigots” and “removing racists from posts featuring POC”, and including a link on “how to correctly, correct someone.”

because someone commented “Chicken Sandwich” on a post titled “Chicken Burger”.

Okay but this also does not scratch the surface either It all started when the sandwich guy posted about what happened to him on r/TIFU, which led to a lot of outrage including someone in the comments saying they were also banned from r/food just for saying they had diabetes (this was later confirmed by a mod). All this anger turned into a brigade which resulted in the entire sub being flooded with almost nothing but posts about Chicken Sandwiches, now known as burgergate. The mod who initially instituted the ban then went on to compare fending off spammers to defending the capitol building during the January 6 riot. You can see in the post that this made it into r/subredditdrama, a community which discusses ongoing drama across reddit. This particular thread in the screenshot is locked, an interesting detail for reasons that come into play later.

Someone else then goes and posts about burgergate on another sub, r/iamveryculinary , which is dedicated to making fun of food related snobbery and drama. This does not go over well, as it turns out that one of the mods of r/food is also a mod of r/iamveryculinary. This mod then proceeds to get slapfights in the comments, which notably includes her saying she would “rain fiery hell upon” anyone who posts chicken sandwiches in r/food, and complaining that she’s so focused on moderating burgergate that she has no time to spend with her kids. People then beg her to forget the chicken sandwich drama and take care of her children. I would love to give you some more details about this incident or tell you the other side, but I can’t since she deleted all the comments of the people she was arguing with so most of what we have left is just the things she herself said. Someone then goes on to post about the r/iamveryculinary drama on r/subredditdrama again. This post immediately gets deleted completely, because it turns out that the r/food mod who also moderates r/iamveryculinary also moderates r/subredditdrama. More people beg the mod to stop caring about the drama and spend time with her kids. The whole thing eventually gets posted to r/subredditdramadrama , a meta sub where people discuss drama that goes down in r/subredditdrama. Another post is then made to r/subredditdramadrama, where the sandwich guy who was initially banned posts his conversation with the mod that banned him. Up until this point, the original mod had been arguing that the permanent ban wasn’t because of the chicken sandwich comment (which was only a 30 day ban), but because he had been rude to the mods when asking why. Screenshots show sandwich guy simply asking why he was banned and then apologizing for the chicken sandwich comment, only to be smugly told by the mod that he needs to “educate himself”, who also insinuates that he’s a weirdo and calls his comment shitty. Don’t miss this mod showing up in the comments of these screenshots and arguing with everyone else over them. So basically the whole thing was one innocuous comment about a chicken sandwich which quickly spiralled into a multi-sub meltdown that has lasted for about two days now. Chicken sandwich guy has not, as far as I know, been unbanned as of yet.

All of us on Tumblr that never get on Reddit:

mrow

Mr. Fantastic warmup

speaking from a place of privilege (has never read homestuck)

happy death to america day to those who celebrate

Worf, Star Trek New Generation

Something about this wave of puritanical evangelism in a progressive hat that's gripping the zeitgeist currently recently caught my attention and I think I've figured it out.

I kept seeing advertisements on Instagram about that movie Corsage, about Empress Elisabeth of Austria. The mini-trailer features Vicky Krieps, who plays Elisabeth, being tightly laced into a corset, demanding it be tighter while maids look concerned.

This is par for the course. Empress Elisabeth was famed for her obsession with her looks and her documented fear of fatness that caused both her orthorexia and her chasing an ever-thinner look. I'd be surprised if that wasn't depicted at all.

And yet there were tons of people in the comments bitching about how the movie was "depicting unsafe corseting practices" and "can't you people get anything about this stuff right?"

It gave me pause. Maybe not everyone knew about Empress Sisi. So I responded to one commenter, "but it's truthful. She really did corset like this."

And the response I got was, "Well, they're making it look like a good thing! People won't know!"

And it clicked. It suddenly made absolute sense.

The idea that depiction is equal to endorsement and encouragement is what is currently in the popular belief system.

Empress Elisabeth was well-documented as going through a well-made leather corset every few weeks because she tightlaced so severely. Her thinnest recorded waist size was 16 inches. She frantically kept herself at 110 pounds on a 5'8 frame. She would fast for days and barely ate when she wasn't fasting. She had herself sewn into her goddamn clothes just to look as thin as possible. You cannot simply overlook this when making historical fiction of her, just like you couldn't overlook Winston Churchill's rampant drinking if you wrote things about him. It is intrinsic to her identity and if you remove it you remove something very fundamental.

And because the trailer depicts this facet of her life, everyone decided that the filmmakers were condoning and even encouraging this practice in real life.

Because they cannot conceive of something just existing. Even in fiction, a depiction of something negative must be proof that the creator thinks it's a good thing. Why else would it be there?

And it was such an enlightening look into how people think. It makes so much more sense.

History, and Sisi's dangerous tightlacing, be damned.

I do want to point out another thing here that tends to be ignored by antis, which is that how you interpret a text is not universal.

Because the response to "there are upsetting and morally wrong things in life that need to be acknowledged" is always "we're not saying you can't EVER bring them up, you just can't romanticize/condone them! If you show them as good, then people will think they're good!"

And like, okay. Y'all know the children's hospital meme, right? The INTENDED meaning by whoever designed it was that it would look like someone dragging a giant red paintbrush around the floor. Fun! And there is obviously at least one person on Tumblr who focused on the theory around the color red and how it's a positive color (probably not the point of the design, but still taking it in a positive way). And then there were a bunch of people on Tumblr who were like, "Uh, it looks like blood, though?" You've got at least three different people who are all looking at the same exact thing and seeing three different meanings.

And that's just a single fucking color, not even a complex story with a lot of moving parts. I am 100% certain everyone here has at least one story with a moral lesson they interpreted differently than the author intended. (Mine is that episode of Arthur where it's supposed to be bad that he punched D.W. in the arm for breaking his model plane. BITCH DESERVED IT. PUNCH HER AGAIN.)

It's not that no story ever romanticizes a bad thing. It's that regardless of whether someone intends to portray a thing as good or bad, someone else is going to interpret it the exact opposite way. So "it's okay if you don't condone it" isn't useful, because whether the text or author condones a thing is not at all relevant to how some people will interpret the same thing. Like, this is so common WE HAVE A DIFFERENT MEME FOR IT.

Bringing it back to Empress Sisi: I am 100% certain that there is at least one person who would see a scene where Sisi is clearly supposed to be neurotic, deeply insecure about her body, and doing things so extreme and unhealthy that the other people around her are clearly judging her for it, and will be like, "Wow!! Corset pretty!!!" Some people are just going to do that.

So, "it's okay if you don't condone it" is really "you can't depict this thing at all because someone might interpret it the wrong way." Which you will note is NOT allowing people to discuss upsetting things, despite protestations to the contrary.

wyd after eating this

After you eat that you sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Sed rhoncus.

Ask not for whom the gurdy hurds. It hurds for thee.

Welcome to make it through this year Monday