CML
Contributor
Wanted to post this here to generate discussion lest we want to move it up to the front page prematurely. Chop it up my crackers
CRACKING A SMILE, CRACKING SOME JOKES: A RE-BUTT-AL TO KIBLER, OR “MAINTAINING A GREAT ENVIRONMENT NOT AT EVENTS”
an MTG article by: CML
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If you’re here, you know that sixteen men at GP Richmond were caught with their pants down the other day, and you know that the Magic community is very unhappy about it. You might even know that the nameless perp has been given an 18-month ban, though you wouldn’t know the details from reading the Mothership’s press release (http://www.wizards.com/Magic/Magazine/Article.aspx?x=mtg/daily/news/20140314). The release seems reasonable on its face; who would be against “camaraderie,” “excitement,” and “a positive and safe environment,” and, more to the point, who would be for “disrespectful, harassing, or bullying behavior,” as well as “hurtful acts”?
I see the same language in the community, which the WotC communiqué describes, incorrectly, as “vibrant.” Most everyone, at least those of us who bothered to write about Crackgate online, scrambled to identify with the “victims” in a way that typifies the Internet’s response to issues like Trayvon’s murder or the Arizona bigots’ bill; the sense of scale, in this case, was even more warped, as now the ratio of Time Put Into Discussing Crackstyle to Time Put Into Making Crackstyle approaches that of “the last episode of Breaking Bad” or (god help us) “Nipplegate.” Many of these words have come from community “pillars,” who have presented a more-or-less united front in condemning the mean bearded dude with the great poker face. A more measured “funny, but inappropriate” came from Riki Hayashi on Twitter; LSV voiced unambiguous disapproval, on the same medium. But nobody got as mad about it as the (usually) brilliant and charismatic Brian Kibler [link to http://bmkgaming.com/cracks-community/ ] …
… While condemnations of Crackgate were very popular (as measured by retweets or Facebook likes), dissenting views were not. This shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone who’s been heavily involved in Magic culture for a long time; much of the uproar here is of the “fans don’t boo nobodies” variety, but that misses that a big source of the momentum is the fact that a public figure cannot, in practice, boo anybody in Magic — least of all a public figure — and expect to remain a public figure himself. Thus the ship of fools fills up; nothing brings together a cult, even ours, like a nice episode of paranoid, self-righteous anger; yet this is still distressing to me. You’d think we’d be a little more used to nudity in Magic, what with the advent of http://www.tarababcock.com/user/home.php, or its precedents, like the Magic-card bikini (one of the few popular phenomena that, sadly, hasn’t been eternalized by the Internet), and I wonder if the devaluation of The Crack Squad is the inverse of the idealization of women common to eighteenth-century novelists, teenagers, and all geekdom alike.
But I digress. Let us not be distracted from the very important business of discussing the ramifications of some guy taking pictures of buttcracks at a Magic tournament and putting them on the Internet. In the comments section of Kibler’s blog post, I wrote a dissenting view; Kibler replied; I replied to his reply; the thread is now dead, presumably deleted, as is his prerogative. I know my perspective — Crackgate has been hilarious and enjoyable — is a fairly popular one within the community; however, few have yet to come out and say it. Here is what I wrote to Kibler:
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Hi Brian -- I'm a fan of yours. I wouldn't mind seeing the guy banned. I also have been following how that fellow made the men in the trenches the butt of all wisecracks with great amusement. I strongly disagree with your butt-hurt reaction (if I may crack a joke or two).
Seriously, though, here are some thoughts on the matter.
I found the pictures funny. My friends who play Magic overwhelmingly found the pictures funny. My friends who don't play Magic funny unanimously found the pictures funny. None of us would take the pictures, much less upload them, and I can see how they weren't funny to other people, but, eh, I still enjoyed them. I could make a utilitarian argument about how a good sense of humor has turned this all into a net positive in spite of hurt feelings, but it's more useful to point this out: the difference between finding it "bullying" or "a joke" is, (for the most part) as you've written, "self-esteem." And, if people with low self-esteem get hurt by this, they can get hurt by anything. I might as well find it funny, and I might as well find your telling me it isn't funny to also be funny: for me, the community reaction has been even more enjoyable than the initial photos. And, really, it's unlikely either of our reactions will have much of an effect on the self-esteem of the community; the whole thing, like Finkel vs. the Gizmodo Harpy, will pass into the realm of “amusing anecdote” in a week or two, but in the meantime it’s all great fun, a much more interesting topic of conversation than “what do we do with the UWR flex slots for the Open on Sunday,” and it makes me wish my friends and I talked about the cultural aspects of Magic far more often.
As for the reactions of “Magic celebrities,” your post is fairly representative. Your language, like the language of those who agree with you, is obviously driven by anger. This kind of anger admits of no alternative; in your view, everyone else ought to be angry, too, and if I'm not angry I'm complicit in the cruelty. But this is predicated on a number of assumptions, the first of which is that the "victims" think of themselves as "victims"; what if they don't? What if a number of them (and I bet this is the case) were laughing at themselves, too? What if many of them just didn't care? You presume to speak for them all, and you presume they have an unhealthy mindset towards this all; saying “It’s intended as shaming!" as if your so-called "empathy" legitimizes that perspective to the point that other healthier responses is so hypocritical and blind to the responsibility you have for your feelings on the matter. It’s also silly, as it’s (pretty clearly to me) first and foremost a joke. This isn't a general and objective judgment on you -- this sort of tunnel vision happens to everyone, especially online -- but I do think the white-knight instinct is both a cause and symptom of low self-esteem. To stretch comparisons across time, too, "getting mad on the Internet" and "self-righteous posturing" are two awful aspects of the MTG community this post exemplifies.
The link between them, which you spent the first few paragraphs describing, is corporate culture. Corporate culture saturates Magic at every level, and it will determine the inevitable fate of The Guy in the Pictures. Let me say that I don’t think this fate is unjust. I can see publicizing the "gotta ban this dude" perspective if you're Wizards, and maybe even believing it a little, needing to make money and appeal to a big demographic and all. But not everyone has to agree. Not everyone here has to feel negatively about the entire affair.
As for the overall image of the game, I don't much care, but if you do, realize this is a symptom more than a cause of being marginalized or whatever. To the extent it is a cause, it is the 20th-most important thing to get mad about. Get mad about it not being worth it for “pros” to go to GPs. Get mad about Modo being a script kiddie's adolescent piddle. Get mad about cigarette butts at cardboard crack. Get mad about the cruel lie that being a Magic pro is a feasible thing. Changing these things will change Magic culture a lot more in the eyes of Magic players and the rest of the world. The rest of the world's reactions to The Butt of all Wisecracks are kinda philistine, too, but they do provide even more much-needed perspective on this trivial issue. Consider what a non-issue this would be in the world of poker, for example …
… A dozen paragraphs into your rant, I get to the phrase "don't be a dick." I see "don't be a dick" trumpeted in MTG all the time, as if it's some sort of categorical imperative. Well, it isn't. There's more going on here. You wouldn't have written so much if there wasn't. Some of this writing touches on the corporate nature of MTG; Wizards often has to "be a dick" to protect its interests, and players do too. I am not saying this should be used as an excuse to be a dick, but more an explanation that everyone is a dick sometimes, and the worst dicks are the ones who pretend (or actually believe) they never are, viz. Hasbro. (How do the employees feel about it? Let’s let them tell us themselves: http://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Wizards-of-the-Coast-Reviews-E4718.htm). Anyway, “don't be a dick" is, at best, one guideline in a sea of guidelines, and, at worst, a vague pseudo-religious platitude that gets used, subconsciously or not, to excuse yourself for being a dick. The rest of your post has little substance beyond its anger; it cycles through precedents of varying similarity, then gets to the real issue at hand, your autobiography which makes you the Emperor of All Once and Future Fat People; for you, it really does "boil down to don't be a dick."
The Magic world thus divides into "self-loathing players who are dicks" and "self-loathing players who aren't dicks." The implication is that anyone who disagrees with you is aligning themselves with objective dickishness. That implication is ludicrous; being offended may very well cause you to stop thinking, but that doesn't give you any special rights or anything. In that same sentence, you attempt to annex "empathy" too, but the rest of the piece does not earn this self-attribution; here, like the typical man with a grievance, have little empathy to give; taking seriously the idea that a bunch of people saw this as "a crusade against exposed butts" shows that, as nobody on that end of things cares as much as you, and it's a straw man in any case. Not only do you have no regard for divergent perspectives here, you also just don't get them.
I also don't think you understand your own reaction, and what and how other people who disagree think and feel about it. For the upshot is that sentiments like "I sure as hell don't want you at any tournament that I’m playing in, and WotC shouldn't either" expose a far stinkier intolerance, indeed ugliness, than 16 or even 4,300 cases of plumber's butt.
The sweetest thing about Magic is how anyone, at any level, can make a sweet play; the very concept and economic model of a TCG hinges on subjectivity, and Magic is one of the few games where you’re more defined by your sweet plays than you are by your mistakes. I just wish this were true in the community. I for one would much rather hang out with the kind of people who find this kind of thing funny than those who don’t. Previous versions of CML have gotten mad, even offended, by events like having their buttcrack exposed and photographed, and though I value the emotions of those previous versions, I don’t do so to the exclusion of every other consideration, especially the realization that this attitude is childish and hilarious. Does this mean I want to ban you? Of course not.
Cheers, CML
Kibler replied with a post of moderate length which held that “Frankly it wouldn’t matter if [any of the ‘victims’ were angry or not],” and which, unsurprisingly, drew a comparison to the Tyler Clementi tragedy (read here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_of_Tyler_Clementi). Again, I don’t have the full text, since it’s been deleted — my only comments that remain are ones I tacked on to the outpouring of positive feedback; ironically, in order to have my views represented, I can’t talk directly to Kibler, but must “boo the nobodies” with whom Kibler here has cynically aligned himself. The form and content of his reply, which might were a microcosm of the original post, albeit with a higher concentration of straw men. I replied,
Haha, of course it matters if they're angry or not. You wrote a thousand words on how angry these things would have made previous Kiblers. Getting mad on behalf of someone who's not mad would be silly; possible anger is a requirement of your whole argument. The "what if they chose not to go to an event" question, as I wrote above, isn't too important for me, but I do acknowledge it is important enough for Wizards that they should ban the dude.
Moving on to some straw men, if someone were to take his own life from this, then it would be terrible, sure, but it would be for a bunch of other reasons, too. "What if the guy who took the pictures took his life for getting an 18-month DCI ban?" "What if PTQ Grinder X took his life because he'd done nothing else for the last ten years and realized the PT didn't make actual 'pros'?" are similar questions in this vein. The Ravi farfetched comparison bespeaks the lack of perspective I was talking about; it wasn't funny at all. But the guy isn't Ravi, people giggling over the pics aren't Ravi's friends, and the pictured buttcrack guys aren't Tyler Clementi. I could ask a dumb question about "what if someone made harmless joke Y and person Z got offended based on flimsy pretext A," and it'd be about as far from this situation as was the Rutgers tragedy, but eh. This is way closer to "Star Wars kid," which has brought humanity much joy.
What it really boils down to (per TCGs) is that these are matters of taste and subjectivity; what I'm trying to get you to admit is that a) you ought to approach it this way, and b) you ought to realize most of us who disagree with you are making a nuanced, subtle, complicated judgment based on enough variables to make a token-clogged board-state look simple. As to whether the pictures are in bad taste or good taste, we can disagree about that
Last thing: this is a good read http://www.plausiblydeniable.com/opinion/gsf.html
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“Don’t be a dick,” like “that’s offensive,” is sometimes used to justify being a dick to someone that’s being a dick, while not even acknowledging it … I feel strongly Kibler et al. are guilty of that on this issue; I also feel the witch hunt has been more shameful than the initial act; the cure has been worse than the disease. I have to wonder if I’m not guilty of that same issue, just a level above — after all, this little drama replays online, in a thousand places, ranging from men’s rights forums to New York Times comments sections, on a daily basis: the Internet’s vice and virtue is that it distances ourselves from the consequences of our actions, and thus lends itself to bringing out latent conflicts, conflicts that spiral further out of control as they become more “meta.” Internet users tend to see their own
That being said, let’s step back and consider these questions: Are pictures of people's huge asses in the breeze not funny? Is calling people who find them so "assholes" not Internet "bullying" or at least "shaming" too? When the community ignores these ideas, it becomes more xenophobic and repellent to outsiders, including prospective Magic players, than it knows. If image is everything, then I’d argue that the cracks aren’t in the community; the cracks are in the community’s facade. Patching up the facade is easy; just ban the guy and go on to the next tournament; in Mel Brooks’ words, “Keep firing assholes!” All this is fine with me. But does it really change much?
The community response, far from being full of “empathy” and “sympathy” and “maturity” and “adulthood,” has been very short on those virtues. Who wouldn’t want to be part of a “moral majority,” until they realize the contextual meaning of that phrase? I don’t mean to position myself as an objective arbiter on the matter, but rather contest the idea that anyone is, since that’s what has gotten us to this point. When Kibler aligns his past selves with the “victims,” I have to wonder the extent to which he’s “still those people” — it turns out that success in Magic is no cure at all for low self-esteem, and that low self-esteem (some would say “self-loathing”) has a peculiar logic of its own, unshakeable from without. This kind of solipsism-as-selflessness is easy enough to parody: “Today, we are all fat dudes with our asscracks hanging out”; or “You say we’re a bunch of fat dudes with our asscracks hanging out? You’re damn right we are!” — the typical cant of the cult, corporation, or congressman. I could point out that the tone of the post is about as far as you can get from self-deprecation and self-awareness. I could ask pointedly if we would rather have a community of people who get mad about buttcracks than those who laugh at them, I could draw parallels between the community’s waxing rage and a bickering couple, and I could get ironically butt-hurt about the attacks on dissenters from, as my friends are considerably nicer than I am. I could mention that a number of community figures of far greater prestige than me privately voiced their support for this article, and hoped it would get published, just “not under their names.” But my last few thoughts are far darker than that …
… Though I don’t intend for this to be a personal attack on Kibler, I do want to take literally his invitation to subject him to “public attention and scrutiny” (though if he really was holding himself to a higher standard, and he really did think it was “fine” to read “horrible things about himself on the Internet,” why would he delete even my initial post?) … This may be a mistake, though, as the post could just be corporate moralistic grandstanding from a private source; a cynical notion, yes, but think how idiotic it would be to literally interpret anything on the Mothership, to take Wizards’ public face at face value. In times of crisis, the best defense is getting offended — it’s their asses that are, so to speak, flapping in the breeze! But when Kibler writes “be the change you want to see in the world,” he must be aware, on some suppressed level, that his article is doing quite the opposite; his reaction was so full of name-calling and negativity and anger and calls for ostracism — everything short of table-flipping, really — that a closer double of this behavior is the guy who took the pictures. The blog post is an act of “bullying” and “shaming.” I, for one, refuse to stoop to the level of calling Kibler a “bully” and a “shamer” in all regards, in all situations, all the time; in fact, I dig his stuff pretty often. But nobody is always right all the time, and Kibler’s role here couldn’t be clearer to me. Not only has Crackgate “made” the lion’s share of the Magic media into everything it hates, at least until the furor subsides, but the Magic media can also never admit this to itself. That, I think, is the primary cause of the outcry.
It is useless to write that it is also the result of that outcry, and equally useless to write that Wizards costs themselves far more business that way than a renegade dickhead with a camera ever could; if Magic is to grow beyond a cult into a culture, it must take account of its own flaws, its own biases and imperfections, in short, the kind of self-awareness the Magic celebrities embody as players, but, at the slightest hint provocation, far too seldom fail to live up to as people. The alternative is the kind of conflict aversion that causes Reid Duke to lament not that Magic Online is a piece of shit, but that Kibler called it a piece of shit. It’s a shame that this kind of auto-da-fé is what lies beyond most “pros’” squeaky-clean public images; if Kibler’s post stands for “empathy” and “inclusivity,” anything can. Good thing the outside world hasn’t noticed this, or doesn’t care.
Thanks for reading!
CML
@BasicForest on Twitter
CRACKING A SMILE, CRACKING SOME JOKES: A RE-BUTT-AL TO KIBLER, OR “MAINTAINING A GREAT ENVIRONMENT NOT AT EVENTS”
an MTG article by: CML
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If you’re here, you know that sixteen men at GP Richmond were caught with their pants down the other day, and you know that the Magic community is very unhappy about it. You might even know that the nameless perp has been given an 18-month ban, though you wouldn’t know the details from reading the Mothership’s press release (http://www.wizards.com/Magic/Magazine/Article.aspx?x=mtg/daily/news/20140314). The release seems reasonable on its face; who would be against “camaraderie,” “excitement,” and “a positive and safe environment,” and, more to the point, who would be for “disrespectful, harassing, or bullying behavior,” as well as “hurtful acts”?
I see the same language in the community, which the WotC communiqué describes, incorrectly, as “vibrant.” Most everyone, at least those of us who bothered to write about Crackgate online, scrambled to identify with the “victims” in a way that typifies the Internet’s response to issues like Trayvon’s murder or the Arizona bigots’ bill; the sense of scale, in this case, was even more warped, as now the ratio of Time Put Into Discussing Crackstyle to Time Put Into Making Crackstyle approaches that of “the last episode of Breaking Bad” or (god help us) “Nipplegate.” Many of these words have come from community “pillars,” who have presented a more-or-less united front in condemning the mean bearded dude with the great poker face. A more measured “funny, but inappropriate” came from Riki Hayashi on Twitter; LSV voiced unambiguous disapproval, on the same medium. But nobody got as mad about it as the (usually) brilliant and charismatic Brian Kibler [link to http://bmkgaming.com/cracks-community/ ] …
… While condemnations of Crackgate were very popular (as measured by retweets or Facebook likes), dissenting views were not. This shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone who’s been heavily involved in Magic culture for a long time; much of the uproar here is of the “fans don’t boo nobodies” variety, but that misses that a big source of the momentum is the fact that a public figure cannot, in practice, boo anybody in Magic — least of all a public figure — and expect to remain a public figure himself. Thus the ship of fools fills up; nothing brings together a cult, even ours, like a nice episode of paranoid, self-righteous anger; yet this is still distressing to me. You’d think we’d be a little more used to nudity in Magic, what with the advent of http://www.tarababcock.com/user/home.php, or its precedents, like the Magic-card bikini (one of the few popular phenomena that, sadly, hasn’t been eternalized by the Internet), and I wonder if the devaluation of The Crack Squad is the inverse of the idealization of women common to eighteenth-century novelists, teenagers, and all geekdom alike.
But I digress. Let us not be distracted from the very important business of discussing the ramifications of some guy taking pictures of buttcracks at a Magic tournament and putting them on the Internet. In the comments section of Kibler’s blog post, I wrote a dissenting view; Kibler replied; I replied to his reply; the thread is now dead, presumably deleted, as is his prerogative. I know my perspective — Crackgate has been hilarious and enjoyable — is a fairly popular one within the community; however, few have yet to come out and say it. Here is what I wrote to Kibler:
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Hi Brian -- I'm a fan of yours. I wouldn't mind seeing the guy banned. I also have been following how that fellow made the men in the trenches the butt of all wisecracks with great amusement. I strongly disagree with your butt-hurt reaction (if I may crack a joke or two).
Seriously, though, here are some thoughts on the matter.
I found the pictures funny. My friends who play Magic overwhelmingly found the pictures funny. My friends who don't play Magic funny unanimously found the pictures funny. None of us would take the pictures, much less upload them, and I can see how they weren't funny to other people, but, eh, I still enjoyed them. I could make a utilitarian argument about how a good sense of humor has turned this all into a net positive in spite of hurt feelings, but it's more useful to point this out: the difference between finding it "bullying" or "a joke" is, (for the most part) as you've written, "self-esteem." And, if people with low self-esteem get hurt by this, they can get hurt by anything. I might as well find it funny, and I might as well find your telling me it isn't funny to also be funny: for me, the community reaction has been even more enjoyable than the initial photos. And, really, it's unlikely either of our reactions will have much of an effect on the self-esteem of the community; the whole thing, like Finkel vs. the Gizmodo Harpy, will pass into the realm of “amusing anecdote” in a week or two, but in the meantime it’s all great fun, a much more interesting topic of conversation than “what do we do with the UWR flex slots for the Open on Sunday,” and it makes me wish my friends and I talked about the cultural aspects of Magic far more often.
As for the reactions of “Magic celebrities,” your post is fairly representative. Your language, like the language of those who agree with you, is obviously driven by anger. This kind of anger admits of no alternative; in your view, everyone else ought to be angry, too, and if I'm not angry I'm complicit in the cruelty. But this is predicated on a number of assumptions, the first of which is that the "victims" think of themselves as "victims"; what if they don't? What if a number of them (and I bet this is the case) were laughing at themselves, too? What if many of them just didn't care? You presume to speak for them all, and you presume they have an unhealthy mindset towards this all; saying “It’s intended as shaming!" as if your so-called "empathy" legitimizes that perspective to the point that other healthier responses is so hypocritical and blind to the responsibility you have for your feelings on the matter. It’s also silly, as it’s (pretty clearly to me) first and foremost a joke. This isn't a general and objective judgment on you -- this sort of tunnel vision happens to everyone, especially online -- but I do think the white-knight instinct is both a cause and symptom of low self-esteem. To stretch comparisons across time, too, "getting mad on the Internet" and "self-righteous posturing" are two awful aspects of the MTG community this post exemplifies.
The link between them, which you spent the first few paragraphs describing, is corporate culture. Corporate culture saturates Magic at every level, and it will determine the inevitable fate of The Guy in the Pictures. Let me say that I don’t think this fate is unjust. I can see publicizing the "gotta ban this dude" perspective if you're Wizards, and maybe even believing it a little, needing to make money and appeal to a big demographic and all. But not everyone has to agree. Not everyone here has to feel negatively about the entire affair.
As for the overall image of the game, I don't much care, but if you do, realize this is a symptom more than a cause of being marginalized or whatever. To the extent it is a cause, it is the 20th-most important thing to get mad about. Get mad about it not being worth it for “pros” to go to GPs. Get mad about Modo being a script kiddie's adolescent piddle. Get mad about cigarette butts at cardboard crack. Get mad about the cruel lie that being a Magic pro is a feasible thing. Changing these things will change Magic culture a lot more in the eyes of Magic players and the rest of the world. The rest of the world's reactions to The Butt of all Wisecracks are kinda philistine, too, but they do provide even more much-needed perspective on this trivial issue. Consider what a non-issue this would be in the world of poker, for example …
… A dozen paragraphs into your rant, I get to the phrase "don't be a dick." I see "don't be a dick" trumpeted in MTG all the time, as if it's some sort of categorical imperative. Well, it isn't. There's more going on here. You wouldn't have written so much if there wasn't. Some of this writing touches on the corporate nature of MTG; Wizards often has to "be a dick" to protect its interests, and players do too. I am not saying this should be used as an excuse to be a dick, but more an explanation that everyone is a dick sometimes, and the worst dicks are the ones who pretend (or actually believe) they never are, viz. Hasbro. (How do the employees feel about it? Let’s let them tell us themselves: http://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Wizards-of-the-Coast-Reviews-E4718.htm). Anyway, “don't be a dick" is, at best, one guideline in a sea of guidelines, and, at worst, a vague pseudo-religious platitude that gets used, subconsciously or not, to excuse yourself for being a dick. The rest of your post has little substance beyond its anger; it cycles through precedents of varying similarity, then gets to the real issue at hand, your autobiography which makes you the Emperor of All Once and Future Fat People; for you, it really does "boil down to don't be a dick."
The Magic world thus divides into "self-loathing players who are dicks" and "self-loathing players who aren't dicks." The implication is that anyone who disagrees with you is aligning themselves with objective dickishness. That implication is ludicrous; being offended may very well cause you to stop thinking, but that doesn't give you any special rights or anything. In that same sentence, you attempt to annex "empathy" too, but the rest of the piece does not earn this self-attribution; here, like the typical man with a grievance, have little empathy to give; taking seriously the idea that a bunch of people saw this as "a crusade against exposed butts" shows that, as nobody on that end of things cares as much as you, and it's a straw man in any case. Not only do you have no regard for divergent perspectives here, you also just don't get them.
I also don't think you understand your own reaction, and what and how other people who disagree think and feel about it. For the upshot is that sentiments like "I sure as hell don't want you at any tournament that I’m playing in, and WotC shouldn't either" expose a far stinkier intolerance, indeed ugliness, than 16 or even 4,300 cases of plumber's butt.
The sweetest thing about Magic is how anyone, at any level, can make a sweet play; the very concept and economic model of a TCG hinges on subjectivity, and Magic is one of the few games where you’re more defined by your sweet plays than you are by your mistakes. I just wish this were true in the community. I for one would much rather hang out with the kind of people who find this kind of thing funny than those who don’t. Previous versions of CML have gotten mad, even offended, by events like having their buttcrack exposed and photographed, and though I value the emotions of those previous versions, I don’t do so to the exclusion of every other consideration, especially the realization that this attitude is childish and hilarious. Does this mean I want to ban you? Of course not.
Cheers, CML
Kibler replied with a post of moderate length which held that “Frankly it wouldn’t matter if [any of the ‘victims’ were angry or not],” and which, unsurprisingly, drew a comparison to the Tyler Clementi tragedy (read here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_of_Tyler_Clementi). Again, I don’t have the full text, since it’s been deleted — my only comments that remain are ones I tacked on to the outpouring of positive feedback; ironically, in order to have my views represented, I can’t talk directly to Kibler, but must “boo the nobodies” with whom Kibler here has cynically aligned himself. The form and content of his reply, which might were a microcosm of the original post, albeit with a higher concentration of straw men. I replied,
Haha, of course it matters if they're angry or not. You wrote a thousand words on how angry these things would have made previous Kiblers. Getting mad on behalf of someone who's not mad would be silly; possible anger is a requirement of your whole argument. The "what if they chose not to go to an event" question, as I wrote above, isn't too important for me, but I do acknowledge it is important enough for Wizards that they should ban the dude.
Moving on to some straw men, if someone were to take his own life from this, then it would be terrible, sure, but it would be for a bunch of other reasons, too. "What if the guy who took the pictures took his life for getting an 18-month DCI ban?" "What if PTQ Grinder X took his life because he'd done nothing else for the last ten years and realized the PT didn't make actual 'pros'?" are similar questions in this vein. The Ravi farfetched comparison bespeaks the lack of perspective I was talking about; it wasn't funny at all. But the guy isn't Ravi, people giggling over the pics aren't Ravi's friends, and the pictured buttcrack guys aren't Tyler Clementi. I could ask a dumb question about "what if someone made harmless joke Y and person Z got offended based on flimsy pretext A," and it'd be about as far from this situation as was the Rutgers tragedy, but eh. This is way closer to "Star Wars kid," which has brought humanity much joy.
What it really boils down to (per TCGs) is that these are matters of taste and subjectivity; what I'm trying to get you to admit is that a) you ought to approach it this way, and b) you ought to realize most of us who disagree with you are making a nuanced, subtle, complicated judgment based on enough variables to make a token-clogged board-state look simple. As to whether the pictures are in bad taste or good taste, we can disagree about that
Last thing: this is a good read http://www.plausiblydeniable.com/opinion/gsf.html
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“Don’t be a dick,” like “that’s offensive,” is sometimes used to justify being a dick to someone that’s being a dick, while not even acknowledging it … I feel strongly Kibler et al. are guilty of that on this issue; I also feel the witch hunt has been more shameful than the initial act; the cure has been worse than the disease. I have to wonder if I’m not guilty of that same issue, just a level above — after all, this little drama replays online, in a thousand places, ranging from men’s rights forums to New York Times comments sections, on a daily basis: the Internet’s vice and virtue is that it distances ourselves from the consequences of our actions, and thus lends itself to bringing out latent conflicts, conflicts that spiral further out of control as they become more “meta.” Internet users tend to see their own
That being said, let’s step back and consider these questions: Are pictures of people's huge asses in the breeze not funny? Is calling people who find them so "assholes" not Internet "bullying" or at least "shaming" too? When the community ignores these ideas, it becomes more xenophobic and repellent to outsiders, including prospective Magic players, than it knows. If image is everything, then I’d argue that the cracks aren’t in the community; the cracks are in the community’s facade. Patching up the facade is easy; just ban the guy and go on to the next tournament; in Mel Brooks’ words, “Keep firing assholes!” All this is fine with me. But does it really change much?
The community response, far from being full of “empathy” and “sympathy” and “maturity” and “adulthood,” has been very short on those virtues. Who wouldn’t want to be part of a “moral majority,” until they realize the contextual meaning of that phrase? I don’t mean to position myself as an objective arbiter on the matter, but rather contest the idea that anyone is, since that’s what has gotten us to this point. When Kibler aligns his past selves with the “victims,” I have to wonder the extent to which he’s “still those people” — it turns out that success in Magic is no cure at all for low self-esteem, and that low self-esteem (some would say “self-loathing”) has a peculiar logic of its own, unshakeable from without. This kind of solipsism-as-selflessness is easy enough to parody: “Today, we are all fat dudes with our asscracks hanging out”; or “You say we’re a bunch of fat dudes with our asscracks hanging out? You’re damn right we are!” — the typical cant of the cult, corporation, or congressman. I could point out that the tone of the post is about as far as you can get from self-deprecation and self-awareness. I could ask pointedly if we would rather have a community of people who get mad about buttcracks than those who laugh at them, I could draw parallels between the community’s waxing rage and a bickering couple, and I could get ironically butt-hurt about the attacks on dissenters from, as my friends are considerably nicer than I am. I could mention that a number of community figures of far greater prestige than me privately voiced their support for this article, and hoped it would get published, just “not under their names.” But my last few thoughts are far darker than that …
… Though I don’t intend for this to be a personal attack on Kibler, I do want to take literally his invitation to subject him to “public attention and scrutiny” (though if he really was holding himself to a higher standard, and he really did think it was “fine” to read “horrible things about himself on the Internet,” why would he delete even my initial post?) … This may be a mistake, though, as the post could just be corporate moralistic grandstanding from a private source; a cynical notion, yes, but think how idiotic it would be to literally interpret anything on the Mothership, to take Wizards’ public face at face value. In times of crisis, the best defense is getting offended — it’s their asses that are, so to speak, flapping in the breeze! But when Kibler writes “be the change you want to see in the world,” he must be aware, on some suppressed level, that his article is doing quite the opposite; his reaction was so full of name-calling and negativity and anger and calls for ostracism — everything short of table-flipping, really — that a closer double of this behavior is the guy who took the pictures. The blog post is an act of “bullying” and “shaming.” I, for one, refuse to stoop to the level of calling Kibler a “bully” and a “shamer” in all regards, in all situations, all the time; in fact, I dig his stuff pretty often. But nobody is always right all the time, and Kibler’s role here couldn’t be clearer to me. Not only has Crackgate “made” the lion’s share of the Magic media into everything it hates, at least until the furor subsides, but the Magic media can also never admit this to itself. That, I think, is the primary cause of the outcry.
It is useless to write that it is also the result of that outcry, and equally useless to write that Wizards costs themselves far more business that way than a renegade dickhead with a camera ever could; if Magic is to grow beyond a cult into a culture, it must take account of its own flaws, its own biases and imperfections, in short, the kind of self-awareness the Magic celebrities embody as players, but, at the slightest hint provocation, far too seldom fail to live up to as people. The alternative is the kind of conflict aversion that causes Reid Duke to lament not that Magic Online is a piece of shit, but that Kibler called it a piece of shit. It’s a shame that this kind of auto-da-fé is what lies beyond most “pros’” squeaky-clean public images; if Kibler’s post stands for “empathy” and “inclusivity,” anything can. Good thing the outside world hasn’t noticed this, or doesn’t care.
Thanks for reading!
CML
@BasicForest on Twitter
