🚩 Report : Ethical issue(s)
Check the readme file, I think this is not the kind of model we need in this place. Thanks for your time.
The other day I contributed a "Make Putin Queer, Please" model. I consider this model a specialized tool of artistic/countercultural moral support and resistance under the conditions of escalating violent oppression. Now someone reported this model as an "ethical issue", using language I found jarring due to indirect associations with the very subject of my model. On some levels, I find that I myself seem to have "an ethical issue" here, not with the model, but with the complaint report. With all due respect to the lodger of the report, I will try to explain. As we all know, there is a war taking place today. And I am writing as someone personally aware of the toll which this war – as well as the violently enforced bigoted and exclusionary internal ideological apparatus of the current Russian regime –is taking on dozens of millions of people, not to mention the millions of queer persons more specifically living today throughout Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine today, many or most of whom are afforded no real choice or options other than to somehow try to survive under these conditions, with very few specialized public tools or ways to even vent their frustration. Or perhaps give some expression to some persevering measure of optimism. Some of us sincerely believe that everyone is queer. Some of us might even console themselves by fancying that Putin himself might actually be queer, whether in a closeted or a repressed way, and if he were to recognize this, then maybe the whole ideology would shift, Russia would retreat out of Ukraine, the war would end, and the streets become safer and more open to pride parades again. Such a belief might sound absurd. It probably is. But it's a sort of thing that can, believe it or not, make some people feel better under really extreme conditions of widespread anxiety, and likely surrounding devastation, plus ever-encroaching despair. As such, I can not accept the reported complaint as legitimate. On a side note, I wish more people would recognize that any active effort to remain "apolitical" (or to render any given public space as such) is never a fully transparent or self-sufficient stance, but always and inherently (as an indirect contribution to some cumulative effect or socio-cultural set of conditions) an implicit gesture of support to one faction or another. With that said, I am not accusing the report-lodger of anything in a personal way, nor am I presuming anything about their real beliefs and sympathies. What I am stating is that I am sincerely jarred by having to confront this given instance of exclusionary language, not altogether dissimilar to the often nonchalant and cordial complaints routinely lodged to the Russian Security Service (the FSB) by superficially or/and avowedly "apolitical" Russian citizens "concerned" about "pro-queer propaganda" and the like. These model citizens would nonchalantly and quietly fume up, then go down the street (or, these days, online) to file their FSB complaints, writing things like "this is not the kind of movie we need in this theater", "this is not the kind of book we need in this store" or "this school", "this is not the kind of person we need living in our apartment house", and so on... And sometimes real people end up in prison or worse. I know that I am under no such threat here in this given instance. But the wording and the nature of this complaint still gives me quite a pause. I am thus forced to report the report and to hope that those who moderate and mediate such things here happen to... well... share a sympathizing to me conception of what such abstractions as "political", "free", "unconditional" and "appropriate", "safe" and "oppressed" can and sometimes do mean, and how much certain possibilities and freedoms ought to be valued, while they persist.
This its not related with the war, not even close to a critic.