![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
In case I don't post tomorrow, Happy Birthday ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
adela711!!
Everybody's doing it, so here's mine. Or at least, here would be mine, only my spoiler policy for HBP is like everything else here: an ongoing argument with myself. In general, I've never had a problem with spoilers, but if I post any, or any references to them, I'll err on the side of caution with cut-tags. I'll probably post warnings for a while after the book's released anyway. I am trying to avoid fake spoilers, which is obviously a silly goal.
I am trying to avoid spoilers, not because I'm worried about spoiling myself really, but just that I don't believe most of them and don't want to get something in my head that I like or don't like when it isn't true anyway. I've seen some possible spoilers already that, as many of you know, I really like--so it'd be lame if I was disappointed that something some random person made up wasn't in the book. Like I said, I don't usually believe spoilers just as a rule, but these surprised me by sounding plausible, and from a poster with a good rep etc. I've seen some since then that started to sound fake, though, which just made me think okay, shut up, I'll wait for the book. I don't know how accurate spoilers are in this fandom usually. I think the only spoilers I knew about in OotP before the book was released (after it was released is a totally different story) was that somebody was going to die, the new DADA teacher was a woman and based on a glimpse of a page on a news clip when someone was flipping through the book fast, the fact that Remus would be in it. So I'm not even aware if there were rumors that were generally accepted as true that were lies pre-OotP. With XF spoilers were pretty trustworthy and part of the on-going discussions all the time. Sometimes this led to people still being angry years later over spoilers that were misunderstood or cut, or bits of dialogue having two meanings: the meaning they seemed to have when we read them from a script and the meaning they had as performed. (Scully's Rain King speech.)
I'm never much for speculations in general. I can't get into conversations about who the HBP will be because it seems like it has nothing to do with the story. That's also why I don't think spoilers really spoil anything. I think it wasidlerat who recently asked when our enjoyment of art became strictly about surprise, and my enjoyment isn't usually based on that--certainly not with this story. This story seems more the type of thing where the surprise reaction is shallow and unsatisfying compared to the "Ohhhh, of COURSE that's what it had to be!" that you get after you've diigested it and it illuminates earlier bits etc. Spoilers are even more superficial because whatever it is, hearing the vague synopsis from somebody's piano teacher's sister-in-law probably isn't going to compare to what actually happens, in my experience. God, just think of how fandom so often screws up scenes we've all read or how people sometimes completely summarize movies and TV shows wrong.
I also don't know exactly how I'll be "handling" the net when the book comes out. My book is coming from England and I definitely won't get it on Saturday. Last time I went out and got another temporary copy on Saturday, after deciding I was going to wait and read it late, and read it all that weekend. This after flipping through comments all morning from people reading the thing, taking huge risks in being spoiled, and winding up opening that OMG, SIRIUS IS DEAD post. Oh well. So I guess this time I'll just be honest and say maybe I'll read posts early, see spoilers, read the book fast, and hop online, or maybe I'll stay off lj for the first week or so and read the copy that's on its way. I commit to nothing.:-)
And now that I've done spoilers, I'd like to talk about the nature of truth, with regards to the real cat that was recently fictionally burned.
For those who don't know, an lj-er claimed her cat Schro was set on fire over Fourth of July, and her friends set up a Pay-pal for donations. The girl was ultimately proved to have been lying by someone who posted a very reasonable post full of facts and phone numbers for people to check it out themselves, along with a chat log where this girl couldn't have been more clearly lying if she had typed I AM LYING in capital letters. Yet still the girl who posted the truth was at first ripped apart by people claiming she was a bad friend for not taking this person's word at face value.
My point isn't that the lying girl was a jerk or that these other people had crazy ideas about what it means to be a good friend, though I think both things are true. No, what freaked me out was that one person defending the girl who lied (before realizing she'd been duped) actually compared finding out whether this cat was currently being treated at a clinic for severe burns to proving God exists. It just freaks me out how literally often I see the same argument being made nowadays. That is, the argument that belief is a matter of just deciding what you want to believe, because there is no such thing as objective truth. This is the same nonsense that's used to defend plenty of current government actions and lies, not to mention the same nonsense that's gotten Intelligent Design into science classrooms and public discourse when it doesn't even deserve to be mentioned in either place. Because scientific theories do have actual proof, meaning physical and logical proof that can be demonstrated, and these other ideas don't, this kind of proof has to be devalued and everything become a question of what you believe to be true. Because of course whether you believe in God or not is a question of faith, because God's not provable logically or phyiscally. That doesn't mean everything is.
So it just shocked me that it had even gotten to this every day level, where a person at least intelligent enough to be able to type in complete sentences seemed to, with a straight face, act like whether or not a specific cat was currently receiving specific treatment in a specific clinic was not something that could be proved by checking with the clinic. I've seen this argument in fandom too, actually. I remember someone once talking about Arthur Weasley getting his tickets to the QWC by smoothing over Ludo Bagman's brother's illegal charming of a lawnmower, and someone called this an "interpretation" and an "opinion," which was not a fact. It was like s/he understood that "fact" meant something you needed to have for an argument to work, so knew enough to throw the word around, yet did not realize what a fact actually was, canonically speaking. (It's not even like she was arguing that Arthur was lying about how he got the tickets, btw) It was like it wasn't a fact because s/he didn't want to believe it. Not that this doesn't work the other way--plenty of times fans do confuse their interpretations for canonical facts and that's annoying too, but you almost expect that more than the reverse.
As somebody who has kind of a fondness for truth, this really frightens me. Recently I think it was Bill Moyers who was interviewed on The Daily Show talking about this and he said it's really incorrect to claim that the truth doesn't get reported because it does. It's just devalued so that the truth doesn't frighten those who are lying. That's a really scary thing. I know Orwell references are wanky, but isn't the line from that something about the freedom to say that 2+2=4 being worth something? Maybe it's nice to be able to throw truth out the window when you've got something you want to be true that goes against the facts, but surely you'll eventually find yourself needing that good old fashioned proof, right?
adela711!!Everybody's doing it, so here's mine. Or at least, here would be mine, only my spoiler policy for HBP is like everything else here: an ongoing argument with myself. In general, I've never had a problem with spoilers, but if I post any, or any references to them, I'll err on the side of caution with cut-tags. I'll probably post warnings for a while after the book's released anyway. I am trying to avoid fake spoilers, which is obviously a silly goal.
I am trying to avoid spoilers, not because I'm worried about spoiling myself really, but just that I don't believe most of them and don't want to get something in my head that I like or don't like when it isn't true anyway. I've seen some possible spoilers already that, as many of you know, I really like--so it'd be lame if I was disappointed that something some random person made up wasn't in the book. Like I said, I don't usually believe spoilers just as a rule, but these surprised me by sounding plausible, and from a poster with a good rep etc. I've seen some since then that started to sound fake, though, which just made me think okay, shut up, I'll wait for the book. I don't know how accurate spoilers are in this fandom usually. I think the only spoilers I knew about in OotP before the book was released (after it was released is a totally different story) was that somebody was going to die, the new DADA teacher was a woman and based on a glimpse of a page on a news clip when someone was flipping through the book fast, the fact that Remus would be in it. So I'm not even aware if there were rumors that were generally accepted as true that were lies pre-OotP. With XF spoilers were pretty trustworthy and part of the on-going discussions all the time. Sometimes this led to people still being angry years later over spoilers that were misunderstood or cut, or bits of dialogue having two meanings: the meaning they seemed to have when we read them from a script and the meaning they had as performed. (Scully's Rain King speech.)
I'm never much for speculations in general. I can't get into conversations about who the HBP will be because it seems like it has nothing to do with the story. That's also why I don't think spoilers really spoil anything. I think it was
idlerat who recently asked when our enjoyment of art became strictly about surprise, and my enjoyment isn't usually based on that--certainly not with this story. This story seems more the type of thing where the surprise reaction is shallow and unsatisfying compared to the "Ohhhh, of COURSE that's what it had to be!" that you get after you've diigested it and it illuminates earlier bits etc. Spoilers are even more superficial because whatever it is, hearing the vague synopsis from somebody's piano teacher's sister-in-law probably isn't going to compare to what actually happens, in my experience. God, just think of how fandom so often screws up scenes we've all read or how people sometimes completely summarize movies and TV shows wrong.I also don't know exactly how I'll be "handling" the net when the book comes out. My book is coming from England and I definitely won't get it on Saturday. Last time I went out and got another temporary copy on Saturday, after deciding I was going to wait and read it late, and read it all that weekend. This after flipping through comments all morning from people reading the thing, taking huge risks in being spoiled, and winding up opening that OMG, SIRIUS IS DEAD post. Oh well. So I guess this time I'll just be honest and say maybe I'll read posts early, see spoilers, read the book fast, and hop online, or maybe I'll stay off lj for the first week or so and read the copy that's on its way. I commit to nothing.:-)
And now that I've done spoilers, I'd like to talk about the nature of truth, with regards to the real cat that was recently fictionally burned.
For those who don't know, an lj-er claimed her cat Schro was set on fire over Fourth of July, and her friends set up a Pay-pal for donations. The girl was ultimately proved to have been lying by someone who posted a very reasonable post full of facts and phone numbers for people to check it out themselves, along with a chat log where this girl couldn't have been more clearly lying if she had typed I AM LYING in capital letters. Yet still the girl who posted the truth was at first ripped apart by people claiming she was a bad friend for not taking this person's word at face value.
My point isn't that the lying girl was a jerk or that these other people had crazy ideas about what it means to be a good friend, though I think both things are true. No, what freaked me out was that one person defending the girl who lied (before realizing she'd been duped) actually compared finding out whether this cat was currently being treated at a clinic for severe burns to proving God exists. It just freaks me out how literally often I see the same argument being made nowadays. That is, the argument that belief is a matter of just deciding what you want to believe, because there is no such thing as objective truth. This is the same nonsense that's used to defend plenty of current government actions and lies, not to mention the same nonsense that's gotten Intelligent Design into science classrooms and public discourse when it doesn't even deserve to be mentioned in either place. Because scientific theories do have actual proof, meaning physical and logical proof that can be demonstrated, and these other ideas don't, this kind of proof has to be devalued and everything become a question of what you believe to be true. Because of course whether you believe in God or not is a question of faith, because God's not provable logically or phyiscally. That doesn't mean everything is.
So it just shocked me that it had even gotten to this every day level, where a person at least intelligent enough to be able to type in complete sentences seemed to, with a straight face, act like whether or not a specific cat was currently receiving specific treatment in a specific clinic was not something that could be proved by checking with the clinic. I've seen this argument in fandom too, actually. I remember someone once talking about Arthur Weasley getting his tickets to the QWC by smoothing over Ludo Bagman's brother's illegal charming of a lawnmower, and someone called this an "interpretation" and an "opinion," which was not a fact. It was like s/he understood that "fact" meant something you needed to have for an argument to work, so knew enough to throw the word around, yet did not realize what a fact actually was, canonically speaking. (It's not even like she was arguing that Arthur was lying about how he got the tickets, btw) It was like it wasn't a fact because s/he didn't want to believe it. Not that this doesn't work the other way--plenty of times fans do confuse their interpretations for canonical facts and that's annoying too, but you almost expect that more than the reverse.
As somebody who has kind of a fondness for truth, this really frightens me. Recently I think it was Bill Moyers who was interviewed on The Daily Show talking about this and he said it's really incorrect to claim that the truth doesn't get reported because it does. It's just devalued so that the truth doesn't frighten those who are lying. That's a really scary thing. I know Orwell references are wanky, but isn't the line from that something about the freedom to say that 2+2=4 being worth something? Maybe it's nice to be able to throw truth out the window when you've got something you want to be true that goes against the facts, but surely you'll eventually find yourself needing that good old fashioned proof, right?
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
From:
no subject
I don't know if I'll be staying off. I'm just flighty. I'm like Maria in Sound of Music: how do you keep a wave upon the sand and all that.:-) I was more sure I'd be staying off before I saw spoilers, which scares me.
From:
no subject
Why are you waiting for the UK ed, anyway? Are they that different? Or is it more 'jumper'/'sweater' stuff?
Anyway, I hope you do turn up. If it chews, we'll need to commiserate and if it rocks, I'll need shock treatment, and we'll need to celebrate; and it won't be the same without you!
From:
no subject
I don't remember much difference--I would have read US the first time and UK with the_snarkery.