Dogpatch Press

Fluff Pieces Every Week

Tag: cancel culture

How to love the freedom of leaderless fandom, and fight the flipside of organized abuse

by Patch O'Furr

 

Do you know the story where several blind people try to describe an elephant by only touching small parts of it? Nobody can say what the whole animal is.

That happens when furry subculture talks about itself, because of how it’s built. The whole thing is a series of bubbles that don’t see each other, in peer-to-peer horizontal structure. Their limited views go with a longstanding habit of reacting against outside stereotypes by falling into their own: The Geek Social Fallacies.

Fallacies can be actively overcome. Ignorance is bliss, but knowledge is power. If you don’t like the media, Be The Media. That’s the mission at Dogpatch Press, to tell the full story warts and all, and own it from inside — before outsiders tell it for you — but there’s always resistance. The subculture keeps stubborn blind spots. Many stories are too inside for professionals to investigate, but hobbyists lack the resources, especially when they explore problems that demand action that people don’t want to take. Difficult, costly, critical stories are the ones that stay overlooked, underreported, and suppressed. Nobody is immune to the psychology of denying uncomfortable knowledge. This is how you get too much shallow drama between peer-to-peer individuals, but too little intensive research with wider scope.

You may say the solution is showing more of the positive; but that’s not seeing the whole elephant.

It’s important to do the difficult work of telling the full range of human experience within, and maturely accept a place in society, not apart from it. The more we know, the more it empowers people to do better. This is a challenge always lagging behind the way this community grows.

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Dogpiling on Social Media: Without long term goals, it’s just empty performance – by WhiteClaw

by Dogpatch Press Staff

WhiteClaw previously submitted Why furries should care about politics in 2018.

Dogpiling

Most of us on the internet have probably heard of and witnessed dogpiling. Some of us have even been unlucky enough to be on the receiving end. But nearly everyone will deny having taken part in it.

Even people in the middle of dogpiling will resist the label. According to them, they are: critiquing, complaining, offering their opinion, standing up for themselves and/or others, responding, calling out — and any other number of words and terms that can be used to describe their actions. 

But never are they dogpiling.

So, what is this strange act that seems to be everywhere, but committed by no one? To answer that question, we have to start at the beginning.

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