Entry tags:
Kidneys, art, and friends
Well, so.
The "Bad Art Friend" NYT story has been exploding across Twitter for weeks at this point and gaining new, stranger dimensions as more and more of the context and backstory are revealed.
I wanted to ignore it, but honestly; I love the detective work involved in a convoluted, multi-platform scandal that dates back years and involves several people's bullshit, as this one does. But probably the thing that got me the most invested in it, and caused me the most discomfort, was seeing some well-known and popular faces in the... social justice/progressed aligned creative circles, for lack of better wording, speculating on whether the kidney donation in question actually happened.
And that super bothered me. As did the number of people desperate to frame the woman who donated the kidney as "just doing it for attention, not actually doing a good deed". Like, I don't know how many of you actually know truly self-centered, fame-seeking assholes, but they are literally the last people on the planet who'd willfully cut open their own flesh to sacrifice a part of it for the sake of someone else. Their whole deal is basically not doing shit for others. Moreover, how in god's name do you look at three people's lives and health being massively improved by the actions of another and go "well that's not a good thing because it wasn't an act of True Alutrism." Do you even hear yourselves?
Anyway, as a result, I spent hours digging through various Twitter threads and court documents trying to solidify my own position, but the absolute best rundown of the whole shebang I've found is:
- this lengthy rundown by Tumblr used Teinriu
It's a LONG read, but it's the one I recommend if you're at all curious about all of ::gestures:: this fuckery.
Teinriu also did a much more speculative post on why a whole community of writers -- not just one writer who plagiarized a letter, as it originally appeared -- seems to have targeted this one, specific woman. Again, it's primarily speculation, versus the more observation-based preceding post, and shouldn't be taken as fact, but the question it asks is apt.
Because at this point, this whole thing, to me, looks way less like a beef between two writers, and a hell of a lot more like a clique of writers banding together to bully one person.
Additional link:
The "Bad Art Friend" NYT story has been exploding across Twitter for weeks at this point and gaining new, stranger dimensions as more and more of the context and backstory are revealed.
I wanted to ignore it, but honestly; I love the detective work involved in a convoluted, multi-platform scandal that dates back years and involves several people's bullshit, as this one does. But probably the thing that got me the most invested in it, and caused me the most discomfort, was seeing some well-known and popular faces in the... social justice/progressed aligned creative circles, for lack of better wording, speculating on whether the kidney donation in question actually happened.
And that super bothered me. As did the number of people desperate to frame the woman who donated the kidney as "just doing it for attention, not actually doing a good deed". Like, I don't know how many of you actually know truly self-centered, fame-seeking assholes, but they are literally the last people on the planet who'd willfully cut open their own flesh to sacrifice a part of it for the sake of someone else. Their whole deal is basically not doing shit for others. Moreover, how in god's name do you look at three people's lives and health being massively improved by the actions of another and go "well that's not a good thing because it wasn't an act of True Alutrism." Do you even hear yourselves?
Anyway, as a result, I spent hours digging through various Twitter threads and court documents trying to solidify my own position, but the absolute best rundown of the whole shebang I've found is:
- this lengthy rundown by Tumblr used Teinriu
It's a LONG read, but it's the one I recommend if you're at all curious about all of ::gestures:: this fuckery.
Teinriu also did a much more speculative post on why a whole community of writers -- not just one writer who plagiarized a letter, as it originally appeared -- seems to have targeted this one, specific woman. Again, it's primarily speculation, versus the more observation-based preceding post, and shouldn't be taken as fact, but the question it asks is apt.
Because at this point, this whole thing, to me, looks way less like a beef between two writers, and a hell of a lot more like a clique of writers banding together to bully one person.
Additional link:
- GrubStreet as an employer - I didn't realize until this that DD and SL weren't just in a writers group, but actually employed together