Lessons in resistance

Bookmarked Courtney Milan (@courtneymilan.com) (Bluesky Social)

If you want to be one of the ones who resist tyranny, then pay attention to how people fold to it, and ask yourself what you would do under the circumstances.

People who fold to petty bullshit often haven’t thought about it and we are socialized to go along with what authority figures say.

+ thread:

Ways to handle censorship if someone asks you on the DL to censor your award.

1. “No, this isn’t in our rules. Is this going to be a problem? I can let the community know that the Hugo rules aren’t going to be applied if so.”

+ thread from Rahaeli

It is absolutely true that most people will say they’d do the right thing in advance before they’re in the situation and then find themselves coming up with all the reasons not to when it actually happens! Which is why it’s important to PRACTICE AND REHEARSE YOUR NONCOMPLIANCE IN ADVANCE.

We know exactly what we will and won’t do when it comes to government requests of every possible type! We have fucking ACTION PLANS for every scenario we could think of! Because it’s fucking easy to pick the path of least resistance in the moment unless you PLAN FOR IT IN ADVANCE.

“Pressure, whether covert or overt, to censor the Hugo ballot” was such a foreseeable risk that people were debating it BEFORE THE CHENGDU BID EVEN WON, everyone on that committee should have been prepared for it!

See also: Marcelo’s comment on Scalzi’s post:

Much like people who claim they would never break under torture…, I hope people really look inward and instead of just assuming they would have the courage to resign and go public and put it all on the line, to really interrogate how easy it is to become an accomplice, enabler, and collaborator before you even realize what you’re doing. These aren’t dastardly villains, they are normal people just like you and me.

This whole Hugo debacle is an exercise in “do not comply in advance.”

(SL Huang lays out the tl;dr:

In sum: it was incompetent, paternalistic racism by the Western Hugo administrators.

Lots of folks had reservations about Chengdu. Did anyone call “Worldcon goes to China, so the *Western admins* entirely screw over not only the Hugo Awards but an entire int’l fandom bc racism all the way down”? 🤬

 

(Also, read Xiran Jay Zhao’s book Iron Widow, it was really good. I didn’t read the other impacted works.)

 

See also:

Pairing: business values

1941: “Who Goes Nazi?”

Resisting Fascism