ethics

Bigotry at Vancouver Comics Arts Festival

This entry was posted in Commentary and tagged Canada conventions ethics fandom on by

A few weeks ago I mentioned USC’s cancelling a valedictorian’s speech because of unspecified threats. In that case, the speaker was seen as pro-Palestinian. The heckler’s veto cuts both ways. It’s been in fannish news that the Vancouver Comics Arts Festival banned artist Miriam Libicki because of unspecified dangers her presence would create. The issue was that she was Israeli and had been in the IDF in the early 2000s, long before the events kicked off by the October 7 massacre.

The resulting reaction from the fan community has thrown the convention leadership into chaos. The people chiefly responsible for the bigoted decision have left the organization, which is good. What’s left of the board has issued an apology, a confession of cowardice. It says in part:

For background, the decision to ban this individual in our previous statement stemmed from two separate incidents on the VanCAF floor that took place during our 2022 and 2024 festivals. Neither incident was instigated by the individual referenced in our previous post. Both involved activists protesting the individual’s presence in a manner that caused concern for the safety of our volunteers, staff, and exhibitors.

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A look into the cancel culture mind 1

This entry was posted in Commentary and tagged ethics Internet on by

We’ve all run into the vicious nastiness which pervades the Internet. If you make public posts, there’s a good chance you’ve been its target, if only from occasional potshots. Sometimes it’s seriously painful. Anyone who’s had a loved one die of COVID needs to think carefully before mentioning the fact publicly.

An Atlantic article by Kaitlin Tiffany, “How Telling People to Die Became Normal”, looks at the kind of people who try to increase other people’s pain. Referring to a Facebook group dedicated to this kind of malice, she writes:
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The pointlessness of trigger warnings 3

This entry was posted in Commentary and tagged education ethics on by

There’s a widespread notion that warning people about impending discussions of distressing topics is a necessary and desirable way of saving them from being “triggered.” Recently, for example, the Student Assembly at Cornell University passed a resolution urging the university to require trigger warnings on a broad range of “traumatic content” in teaching materials. The university quite appropriately rejected this recommendation.

Do these warnings do more good than harm? What kind of “triggering” are they supposed to present? What will their effect be? More and more people are agreeing that on the whole, these warnings aren’t helpful. They can lead to the suppression of discussion of important topics.
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Followup on Balticon

This entry was posted in Commentary News and tagged conventions ethics fandom science fiction on by

In June I wrote about Balticon’s treatment of Stephanie Burke, which appeared to be outrageous. This week Balticon issued a statement on the matter. It shows they took the matter seriously, which is good, but I’m not convinced they got to the heart of the problem.

Just to be clear, I wasn’t present and I don’t know any of the people directly involved. However, I’ve encountered enough similar cases at fan-run conventions to know that there is a problem with speech codes and arbitrary accusations at several of them. This includes one person, who prefers not to be named, who has been the target of false accusations by the Balticon organization. The situation with Burke gave the impression from the beginning that Balticon was in the wrong, and their statement acknowledges it. It dumps all the blame on one staffer, though.
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