2022 LC Thread—New Year, New Thread

I found this interesting article over at Vox that partially explains why this is such a big deal. This trial has been hijacked by the alt right and their army of losers and bots on the internet, and they’re amplifying the anti-Heard stuff. For them, the trial is basically a proxy war for their war on women in general.

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Yes, very much like GamerGate.

Fun fact, the house ethics committee can’t do anything

https://twitter.com/ronfilipkowski/status/1528816135285706757?s=21&t=zIDpUm9mEk5bxKaPTOHPmQ

https://twitter.com/nprpolitics/status/1528844746285731840?s=21&t=zIDpUm9mEk5bxKaPTOHPmQ

lol, the “world ecommunist forum”

What is extra strange about it is how easily it seems to be capturing normies. My girlfriend (who is a therapist!) regularly mentions the dumb thing that Amber Heard said that day because it comes across her Instragram or TikTok feed. She knows that Amber Heard was likely abused (and dished it out too, apparently) and yet still gets sucked into the void of anti-Heard propaganda.

It’s crazy. We’ve talked about how they’re clearly both terrible people, etc etc, but there still isn’t an anti-Depp thing to be seen in the mainstream of social media, while there is clip after clip mocking Amber Heard.

you guys can’t make me have an informed opinion on heard/depp. I won’t allow it

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Honestly you probably already have one just by being a reasonable person with a bit of empathy. The informed opinion is that they’re both terrible people who were mutually abusive and are now using the public spectacle of this court case to get back at each other, but because she was abusive towards him and isn’t as good at public speaking the usual suspects have turned it into an anti-MeToo clownshow. Don’t bother going any deeper than that because the rest will just frustrate you.

These are still being sold new. I used to pass through a few of them going to work.

The one thing I’ve noticed is it’s not just the alt right incels that are giddy over the Depp/Heard trial (although I’m sure they’re the ones controlling the narrative). I’ve got several female, liberal friends who post a ton of pro choice, me too, believe women stuff on Facebook who are flooding my feed with anti Heard posts.

The whole thing has made me super uncomfortable from Day 1. Fuck social media. (Except you guys. You guys are cool.)

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Define celebrate. I’m not sure I’ve been anywhere that even went to melon party level. One place I worked would send you a small memento every 5yrs and some sort of card which they probably had printed in bulk just for this purpose.

The Atlantic had a good article on the Heard/Depp thing last week.

Some of the most active commenters aren’t so much determined fans of Johnny Depp as anti- fans of Amber Heard.

Hilde Van den Bulck, a professor of communication at Drexel University, has studied the version of fandom that inverts its practices and creates a community of denigration. Where fandom tends to derive from a positive emotion ( I love this actor; I love that character ), anti-fandom draws from just the opposite, and nurtures negative feelings toward a famous person or character. Fans and anti-fans both express themselves through online sleuthing: They hang on the object of their fascination’s every word, and analyze every detail of that person’s wardrobe and hairstyling and self-presentation. “Anti-fans know as much about their object of anti-fandom as fans do about their object of fandom,” Van den Bulck said. Their relationship with the celebrity they despise is “often very deep, very emotional.”

Thank goodness we never do that here.

Japanese mascot metal

What is there to say :crazy_face:

My employer promised me an MDE for my upcoming 20th anniversary.

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The mechanics of the relationship between the fan and the object seems right, but were there any die hard anti- Amber Heard fans before the whole situation with Depp? The rest of the article is interesting

Some anti-fans are disillusioned former fans ( I used to love celebrity X, but now … ). Others’ hatred may be unprovoked ( I just can’t stand celebrity X, and resent their place in public life ). In many situations, as Van den Bulck explains it, anti-fans and fans are overlapping groups: The anti-fan of celebrity X hates celebrity X because celebrity X harmed celebrity Y, of whom the anti-fan is a fan.

I’ve come across this latter group before. In 2020, I reported on fandom communities that were fixated on theories that the male objects of their fandom were being manipulated and tortured by less-famous, female romantic partners. A faction of Benedict Cumberbatch fans believed that his wife, Sophie Hunter, was part of an international crime ring and had faked all of her pregnancies.

These fans, who are also anti-fans, subject the women they hate to body-shaming and wild criminal accusations, and skewer them using sexist tropes. The targets of their anti-fandom are manipulative and ambitious, as a rule, but also stupid. They are glamorous and seductive, but also secretly disgusting. When I interviewed a Cumberbatch fan who was a firm believer in the conspiracy theories about his wife, she identified herself as a feminist. It was Hunter, she said, who was “setting women’s rights back [and] making everybody look bad.” Many Depp supporters now make the same argument. They insist that they are not a reactionary movement trying to undo the work of the #MeToo movement, and that questioning Heard’s claims does not make them misogynistic. If anything, she is the one who is making a joke out of #MeToo, and making things harder for “real” victims of abuse. Lady Victoria Hervey, a small-time British model and socialite with some 300,000 Instagram followers, has written that Heard “sounds like she would be more at home in a psych ward,” and referred in a recent Instagram story to “girls like these that constantly make things up.”

A lot of the anti- Amber Heard stuff is sleight of hand pro Depp fandom, which would explain why you’d get seemingly liberal feminists hating on Heard.

I’m super jelly. Defiant jazz is definitely a solid choice.

Never heard of the group, though the lead singer is Funashi, the most popular town mascot in Japan.

Looks like they’re trying to produce a mascot version of Baby Metal.

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Buy a laser printer and all of your worries will go away.

Grunching so not sure if that has already been said.

Wish I was a teenager in NSW, faking digital driver’s license easy peasy.

Protecting the data w a 4 digit pin is :game_die: :game_die:

Oh no Australian teens may obtain access to alcohol with these fake IDs!

Haha. I regularly read a sub reddit where 70k people hate on a former mma heavyweight and fourth rate Joe rogan acolyte comedian. The negativity is some of the funniest stuff I see on a regular basis.