The royal privilege May 18, 2018 3:01 PM Subscribe

Regarding the mod note in the royal wedding thread, why are we pushing an unabashed royalist view of this spectacle? Should any negativity of this really be off limits?
posted by gnuhavenpier to Etiquette/Policy at 3:01 PM (197 comments total) 11 users marked this as a favorite

There's been some negativity in there and it's not a 100% no-negativity zone. That said, it's not the first and won't be the last thread about stuff regarding British royalty, and we have had and will have plenty of free-ranging and critical discussions of that monarchy, monarchy in general, spectacle and spending and everything problematic about all that and more; letting people have a relatively non-arglebargly time of talking about a specific fun-for-them thing every once in a while is okay and should not be that hard for folks with an itch to be critical to just take a pass on.

Everything worth criticizing will, in short, still be there for the next thread, and some people can have a non-aggro, non-shitty time in the mean time ideally.

As far as specific moderation stuff that's happened in there today:

There was some reflexive IT BAD stuff right at the top that was a crappy way to set a tone, and I deleted that and left a note at the time to try and head some off.

There were a couple of other especially reflexive "well I just think it's bad!" type comments nixed (including one from some dude who then proceeded to make an unrelated self-link on the front page and get his ass banned, it's been an odd day).

I deleted your comment specifically beefing about moderation because it shouldn't have gone in that thread in the first place; starting with MetaTalk to begin with (or even just the contact form) is the more appropriate way to go with this sort of thing.
posted by cortex (staff) at 3:06 PM on May 18, 2018 [30 favorites]

Actually just came here right now to post more or less exactly this.

After what feels like decades of enforced unecessary austerity (at this point we can probably all write the rest of this paragraph together), watching slack-jawed and helpless as an entirely indefensible Brexit gets waved through left and right, while the Home Office illegally deports elderly PoC seemingly at will and a culture of institutional corner-cutting on everything except that related to the very rich leads to disasters like Grenfell, the spectacle of a Royal Family choosing now to stop the entire country for a week (poss. exaggeration here) in order to celebrate an outrageously expensive wedding (poss. understatement here) is sticking very hard in many British craws.

The fact that 'aw ain't these Brits so damn cute with their old-timey traditions' is a popular overseas view is just lovely - indeed it's a great deal of what remains of the whole actual serious point of having a Royal Family - but that is neither here nor there at this time.

UPDATE: on preview, reading cortex's comment above, I do get it; I have myself deliberately not been looking too hard at the thread on the blue on the basis that I definitely do not have anything non-arglebargly to contribute at this time. Perhaps we could have this thread right here for arglebargle and let the fun-for-them thing be as is over there on the other side.
posted by motty at 3:16 PM on May 18, 2018 [40 favorites]

Metafilter: Perhaps we could have this thread right here for arglebargle.
posted by Melismata at 3:43 PM on May 18, 2018 [51 favorites]

...why are we pushing an unabashed royalist view of this spectacle?

Pushing? Oh please... are you being forced to comment in there? No. If you aren't into it, or find it ridiculous, then you just leave it be for those who are enjoying it, or enjoying discussing things like cake, clothes or corgis around it.

If, on the other hand, every positive thread attracts false negative claims, derails, or drive-by sanctimonious "Stop enjoying this because I will tell you a bad thing about it and you should not be happy", then MetaFilter eventually becomes a relentlessly negative, mentally unhealthy and unwelcome place to hang out. It's a long way down that road already.

And (and this I can extremely relate to) MetaFilter also becomes an increasingly pointless place to spend time making happy/fun/positive posts if there's a good chance they're going to attract negative derails. Heck, there's more than enough negative threads across the site at any one time. If the contraditions and annoyances (and there are indeed some, such as homeless removals, cost, constitutional relevance, Nicholas Witchell being insufferable) of the royal wedding are really making your blood boil, then the current Fucking Fuck thread is ideal. Why not post your anger and frustration there?

Perhaps we could have this thread right here for arglebargle and let the fun-for-them thing be as is over there on the other side.

That's a much better, and less thread-shittingly idea than boring people like the worst kind of party guest on the FPP thread. Some people may also have mixed views (holds hand up) and can post appropriately, like adults, in both.
posted by Wordshore at 3:45 PM on May 18, 2018 [88 favorites]

I read through the thread and but the strongest criticism I can muster is that as currently constructed it feels like it might fit a wee bit better in Fanfare. I don't care about the royal wedding, so I'm gonna treat it like a thread about any other cultural event I don't care about and move on without commenting.
posted by Existential Dread at 3:51 PM on May 18, 2018 [22 favorites]

Wordshore - quite the contrary, I’m being forced not to comment in there.
posted by gnuhavenpier at 3:54 PM on May 18, 2018 [7 favorites]

I read through the thread and but the strongest criticism I can muster is that as currently constructed it feels like it might fit a wee bit better in Fanfare.

Heh, yeah. I was mentioning the thread this morning to Secretariat, and how it had needed a little steering, and she was like "why isn't it just a FanFare thread?" and the answer is: because it got posted on the blue, basically. As a special event thread on FanFare I think it'd work fine too, fwiw, and if that had come up as the plan ahead of time I'd have been fine with doing that and sidebarring it instead.

But FanFare was built to accommodate a larger and less restrictive volume of media posts than the blue does, not to supplant media posts altogether, so sometimes there'll be stuff like this on the blue. And jenfullmoon did a good job of rounding up a whole bunch of stuff on the web, which I appreciate as a kind of show of effort for goofy media happening posts.

quite the contrary, I’m being forced not to comment in there.

MetaFilter is a sprawling and often self-directed place; I can understand being annoyed at being shut down in a given thread, but accepting that not every thread is really going to be your jam and sometimes your energy can be better spent elsewhere on or off the site is I think a part of maintaining a healthy relationship with the site. There's threads I just nope right out of too even though I definitely Would Have Something To Say if I stuck around, but sometimes it's a better community-minded approach to just nope out and let a thing I don't care for just be what it is.
posted by cortex (staff) at 4:07 PM on May 18, 2018 [32 favorites]

It’s the polite thing to stay out of threads with negative opinions when the topic being discussed is a favourite movie or album or something. But when the topic involves hereditary heads of state and a man known for dressing as a nazi (at a fancy dress party) and having to be sent on diversity training after using racist slurs in the workplace then I think some dissent should possibly be expected.
posted by gnuhavenpier at 4:07 PM on May 18, 2018 [35 favorites]

Wordshore's back!!
posted by kimberussell at 4:12 PM on May 18, 2018 [26 favorites]

I don't give two shits about the royals, and I 100% agree with this moderation.
posted by Chrysostom at 4:17 PM on May 18, 2018 [32 favorites]

A toast to Wordshore! And a cheese as well!
posted by mochapickle at 4:17 PM on May 18, 2018 [12 favorites]

Wordshore's back!!

Not really; was just briefly lurking and was delighted to see the well-put together - that took some time - post about the Royal Wedding by jenfullmoon, and further happy that site-ruining derails and threadshitting were being well-handled by the moderators. Have reduced online social media stuff (including MetaFilter) to mostly just positive/fun/happy/stuff, and am outdoors most of this summer anyway.
posted by Wordshore at 4:18 PM on May 18, 2018 [40 favorites]

Well it's good to see you back, even if only for a little while. Completely understand the need to step back from the web. Enjoy your summer!
posted by Homo neanderthalensis at 4:20 PM on May 18, 2018 [9 favorites]

Since no one has linked to it yet and it's crawling down the front page, this is the Royal Wedding thread in question.
posted by zarq at 4:54 PM on May 18, 2018 [2 favorites]

*waves to wordshore*
posted by zarq at 4:54 PM on May 18, 2018 [5 favorites]

I kinda disagree, it's not negativity or criticism per se but whether the thread will have people fighting and arguing. That's negativity of users at each other, which is against site policy for [reasons]. There's other threads where the opinion about the topic is largely negative, meaning, people agreeing that a topic or an article is a bad thing. That's a distinction, the two senses of negativity. If people are arguing (heatedly, aggressively) then it's easiest for the mods to pick one side and say that line of discussion is off the table for the purposes of that particular thread. Which is what happens in practice.
posted by polymodus at 4:55 PM on May 18, 2018 [4 favorites]

Look at it this way: Trump is essentially a King, and many people voted for him because, deep down, they wanted a Monarch.

If we had an actual Monarch, with only ceremonial duties, and merely symbolic power, there never could have been a Trump.
posted by jamjam at 5:08 PM on May 18, 2018 [2 favorites]

Frankly if you can't put together a very interesting and well researched thread on the British royal family that will lend itself to bashing them, Theresa May, Parliament, Brexit and possibly Thomas Cromwell, then your opinions on the topic are probably not worth airing in any thread at all and you should feel bad. And if you can do that, then it might help you get over the unbearable affront of being told not to piss on everyone's cornflakes.

Hopefully the mods would just delete a lame single link "I hait royals" though.
posted by the agents of KAOS at 6:07 PM on May 18, 2018 [16 favorites]

Bashing Oliver Cromwell is fine, you stay off of Thomas.
posted by Chrysostom at 6:15 PM on May 18, 2018 [15 favorites]

Hi Wordshore! It's nice to see you back, even if it's just briefly!
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 6:32 PM on May 18, 2018

Bashing Oliver Cromwell in an anti-royals thread seems a little off somehow. Thomas made them their own church!
posted by the agents of KAOS at 6:52 PM on May 18, 2018 [1 favorite]

I ask this with genuinely no snark intended: people are over that time he cosplayed as a Nazi? Maybe I need to research later apologies or something.
posted by lauranesson at 7:11 PM on May 18, 2018 [4 favorites]

FanFare
Special Event: Royal Wedding (Tory Edition)
Hooray for Harry and Meghan, the Duke and soon-to-be Duchess of Somewhere!

Special Event: Royal Wedding (Whig Edition)
Boo! Why is this on my television? If a bunch of scrapping colonists can send them packing, why can’t we?
posted by Huffy Puffy at 7:35 PM on May 18, 2018 [6 favorites]

people are over that time he cosplayed as a Nazi?

I think there is a difference between being over it and feeling that every time he gets brought up it needs to be with the words "The Cosplaying Nazi" somehow appended to his name. I mean, I would laugh, but the point here on MeFi is that sometimes people need to manage the fact that other people's priorities may vary wildly from their own.
posted by jessamyn (retired) at 7:36 PM on May 18, 2018 [31 favorites]

Am I over the time a 20 year old did something fucking dumb? Yes, yes I am. If he had been at Charlottesville I'd feel differently. I know too many people who have dressed up in extremely poor taste costumes in college to think it is an irredemable act.
posted by gatorae at 7:44 PM on May 18, 2018 [46 favorites]

I feel like it's ok to like complicated things. If I drew a hard line on every damn thing or person with regards to their past behaviour, I wouldn't be able to enjoy much in life. People are weird and complex.

Is the Royal family fraught with all kinds of awful political/social historical issues, absolutely. I am against Empire and Colonialism, I say this as an Indian that comes from a people that have suffered mightily from that legacy. But I also recognize how this Royal family has shaped history, and so I have an interest in things like the watching The Crown. I also enjoy fashion and pageantry. And I also hate nazis.

I don't know, I just want to sometimes turn off my brain and watch a thing and smile. I'm choosing to do that for this wedding.
posted by Fizz at 8:18 PM on May 18, 2018 [41 favorites]

Yeah I back the mods here but I also agree that this isn’t really like popping into the Infinity Wars thread all i hate marvel!!! It’s people in the UK who are more likely I think to have anger and resentment about this, but they’re being kind of de facto discouraged a bit from participating. Meaning it’s mostly a bunch of Americans commenting on something that’s happening abroad. That also has kind of shitty implications. Metafilter has issues with being a bit overly America-centric. I get liking pomp and circumstance and pageant. I also think the British royal family is symbolic of a lot of fucked up shit. Making commenting about that off limits just feels kind of weird. Otoh I get that a thread that is all shit up with the royals sux! would be stupid. I dont know.
posted by supercrayon at 9:04 PM on May 18, 2018 [33 favorites]

Also meant to add, I thought the post and all the links were really cool.
posted by supercrayon at 9:07 PM on May 18, 2018 [3 favorites]

Okay, for the royal haters among you: this one should be fun for you....
posted by jenfullmoon at 9:58 PM on May 18, 2018 [4 favorites]

To draw an analogy to help explain why I’m a bit uncomfortable:

If it was like a post talking about the superbowl halftime show, and one of the teams playing happened to be the Washington Redskins, would it be alright for a bunch of British people to be like I just want to enjoy Justin Timberlake so all you Americans talking about the racist history of that team and the conservative nature of the owners need to back off and let me just enjoy the show? That would be weird and kind of offensive right?

I will admit that this analogy is deeply flawed because no one in reality ever wants to just enjoy Justin Timberlake.
posted by supercrayon at 10:01 PM on May 18, 2018 [26 favorites]

I think in a post about the halftime show, discussion should reasonably be centered around the halftime show. A separate post about the offensive name of the Washington team would also be fine.
posted by Chrysostom at 10:11 PM on May 18, 2018 [18 favorites]

It is a significant exercise of privilege to be able to pick and choose the times when you are willing to care about certain issues, to be able to wall off specific places and times and say 'nope, I am just going to enjoy this otherwise problematic thing non-ironically and without deep internal examination of all the ways in which it is problematic.'

I don't know how to reconcile knowing that with the fact that I also think a Metafilter post about the Superbowl Half Time show would be a fairly inappropriate place to talk about the Washington Redskins and the racist history of the team and the conservative nature of the owners. A post that's about one or more of the very many things wrong with the NFL -- racism, concussions, misogyny against cheerleaders and/or wives, etc, -- that was prompted by the Superbowl, however, could be a very excellent place to discuss that issue.

And then I don't know how to reconcile *that* with the fact that I have definitely participated in social justice oriented discussions on threads where the original poster and some of the other members were clearly aiming for a much more light-hearted conversation rather than a serious examination of underlying systemic flaws.

I mean, I do know how to reconcile them, but that requires me to think not very nice things about myself, so I'm trying not to.
posted by jacquilynne at 10:33 PM on May 18, 2018 [9 favorites]

"would it be alright for a bunch of British people to be like I just want to enjoy Justin Timberlake so all you Americans talking about the racist history of that team and the conservative nature of the owners need to back off and let me just enjoy the show?"

Not quite this exactly, but we actually do mod football posts that are like "woooooo Superbowl!" and a bunch of people want to come and be like, "Football causes brain damage and nobody should watch it and PS it's super-racist." (And, vice versa, the much rarer clunker where there's a serious post about CTE and football and some dork comes in to be like, "BUT DID YOU SEE THE AWESOME GAME LAST NIGHT?" get modded out.) They're both totally fine conversations to have and we've had both many times at MeFi. But not every thread has to encompass every aspect of the topic under discussion, and when people try to frame a thread to be about enthusiasm for something -- the royal wedding, football, a movie, a singer, pro wrestling, comic books -- we do try to allow space for that enthusiasm and for threads to be about enthusiasm, and we do delete people coming in to say things like "your favorite band sucks" or "pro wrestling is fake" or "you're bad people for enjoying this." (See also: dead goating.)

If the post tonight had been (say) a thoughtful discussion of the problems with the monarchy and the costs it imposes on the UK and how its cultural significance is increasingly problematic and so on, viewed through the lens of the royal wedding, and people came into the thread wanting to squee about the royal wedding, we probably would have said, "Hey, this thread is about the problematic aspects of the monarchy and the royal wedding; I've created a fanfare post for people who want to liveblog the royal wedding so it won't derail this post."

I think one of the things the US politics thread have thrown into kind-of high relief for me is how difficult it is to have threads that encompass every aspect of any particular topic, and that more limited threads are a lot easier to follow (and to moderate) and create deeper conversations. And, relatedly, that protecting threads that are lighthearted (even though the underlying thing we're being lighthearted about will always be in some fashion problematic) is good for the site, because the world is just so tough right now, and when every thread rehashes all the tough things, the site suffers and our members suffer.

Because, yeah, to return to Timberlake, I totally do want to be able to read a post where I enjoy Taylor Swift's latest music video confection without the thread turning into "but has she denounced the Nazis enough?" Or, on Timberlake specifically, I have a lot of thoughts about his problematic relationships with women, including his wife, but if people were getting excited over his latest album and dissecting the music, I wouldn't drop into the thread to remind everyone that he's a kinda shitty human who steals Jessica Biel's spotlight to self-promote at every possible opportunity, even though I do feel like that's actually a cultural thing we should talk about because it's a) annoying and b) illustrative of how male and female stars are treated differently in the celebrity ecosystem. But I'm okay if sometimes people who aren't me just want to enjoy their Timberlake! There will be another thread where we talk about the gender dynamics of celebrity culture -- or of course I could always make one.
posted by Eyebrows McGee (staff) at 10:46 PM on May 18, 2018 [53 favorites]

I’ve had a simply awful few weeks, medically. Right now my life is a lot of pokes and prods and electrodes and endless giant needles. This week, I got some especially bad news when I was counting on good.

So to take a few hours and try to eke out a little bit of joy watching a fancy wedding for strangers on the other side of the planet doesn’t feel like privilege to me. It feels like a reprieve.
posted by mochapickle at 10:47 PM on May 18, 2018 [34 favorites]

As one of MeFi's British subjects for whom this is more of a real life issue and less a particularly neato and quaint Epcot parade, I'm not enormously comfortable that posting anything other than paragraphs of blandly cheerful whimsy would see us labled as non-adults who would lead Mefi to a place of dark, mental health-damaging negativity.

It's clear that there are threads where overall negativity vis. the original post is just fine; nobody seems very upset that this thread about Cool Picking Robots has centred mainly around the dire effects for workers, just for one example.

I do feel positively about the suggestion to move the thing over to Fanfare alongside The Crown if people want a place to uncomplicatedly enjoy the pageantry; the norms on that section of the site seem like a much better fit for this.
posted by ominous_paws at 10:53 PM on May 18, 2018 [25 favorites]

I look forward to celebrating the next Trump inauguration in an upbeat protected space, right here on Mefi. It's half a world away after all.
posted by biffa at 11:05 PM on May 18, 2018 [36 favorites]

But not every thread has to encompass every aspect of the topic under discussion, and when people try to frame a thread to be about enthusiasm for something -- the royal wedding, football, a movie, a singer, pro wrestling, comic books -- we do try to allow space for that enthusiasm and for threads to be about enthusiasm, and we do delete people coming in to say things like "your favorite band sucks" or "pro wrestling is fake" or "you're bad people for enjoying this."

Maybe it's obvious to the point of dumbness on my part to say, but I feel like the norms and values of this place super decide what's okay to dead goat and not. There are some topics and events which just would not fly here as enthusiasm based threads. People feel like a British royal wedding is absolutely one such event, some incredibly strongly. I mean if one of Trump's kids was getting married we definitely would not see the same sort of thread. And the animosity towards the monarchy absolutely runs deeper for many.

Mostly, I just wanted a positive space to talk about SuperShe Island. (I'm kidding, I'm kidding!)
posted by ODiV at 11:10 PM on May 18, 2018 [7 favorites]

This is fair; the Americans were, after all, allowed the chance to enthusiastically vote the Trumps in.
posted by ominous_paws at 11:35 PM on May 18, 2018 [4 favorites]

the agents of KAOS: I was comparing, but hopefully in doing so showing how they were different. Compare doesn't mean equate, right? They are two things that are different which are treated differently here on MetaFilter is what I was trying to get across. Certain things here just aren't going to have positive threads here because of the values and norms of this place. We cannot segregate certain "fun" things from their problematic contexts. We're certainly not about to have a retrospective on the great movies the Weinstein Company has put out over the past decade either.

For some people the line is in different places, is all I was trying to get across.

I'm pretty fortunate that my values fall pretty squarely in line with most of the community and the mod team. I'm not really someone who's going to feel the need to step into a royal wedding thread and talk shit. In other threads someone will jump in and beat me to the well deserved shit-talking and it will stand.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but if your point is that the two things are different enough where one can have a positive thread on MetaFilter and one can't, then we're saying the same thing.
posted by ODiV at 11:53 PM on May 18, 2018 [1 favorite]

I did misunderstand you, I thought you were saying that this should be treated the same as a Trump wedding - sorry!
posted by the agents of KAOS at 1:09 AM on May 19, 2018

We need more posts about royal weddings.
posted by pracowity at 1:26 AM on May 19, 2018 [2 favorites]

As a Brit in the US I think anyone trying to compare the public perception of/"relationship" with the royal family in Britain to that of the Trumps in the US is completely uninformed on at least one of those topics, quite possibly all four.

Firstly, there is no single relationship between the Trumps and the US population and the Royal Family and the Brits, there is a wide diversity of perspectives. But that's besides the point - I'll try to be clearer in making my point. The moderation policy on that thread effectively treats an aspect of UK culture in a way that would never be acceptable in a US focused thread on this site. It stifles comment and reduces something which is ineffably political to be allowed only as an entertainment spectacle for non-UK members.
posted by biffa at 1:47 AM on May 19, 2018 [18 favorites]

I didn't see the removed comments but have seen the mod note- was it substantive comments or was it 'I don't care about this' type? Because the second would get removed on any thread, and that's what the mod note suggests. And we've been repeatedly reminded on Trump threads that 'here is a bad thing that happened' or 'Fuck Trump' with no wider context comments would be removed, and that's not far removed from 'they are parasites'- if thats what was going on.
posted by threetwentytwo at 1:57 AM on May 19, 2018

I still think you are wrong, because it is obviously an entertainment spectacle for at least some UK members as well. Many people in the UK would probably disagree that it is political at all..
posted by the agents of KAOS at 1:58 AM on May 19, 2018 [6 favorites]

Many people in the UK would probably disagree that it is political at all..

Arguably they'd be wrong, in a similar way to those who argue that the showing of the flag at an NFL game is not political whereas the protesting of the same *is* political and thus inappropriate - merely because something is established and the accepted default does not make it not political.

But further, this is again not really what's at stake here. Grant that some chunk of the population see this as an apolitical knees-up; does that mean that those who don't should be shushed off out of the thread? This wouldn't hold for most topics on mefi, and I think the argument here is that it shouldn't for this wedding, and the US-centricity of the site is playing into this.

It's not the worst disaster! I also roll my eyes when people stomp in shouting BUT NAZI FANCY DRESS! But I think the concerns are legitimate.
posted by ominous_paws at 2:20 AM on May 19, 2018 [12 favorites]

(mods or anyone feel free to alert if this is getting too much into tedious back and forth, ofc)
posted by ominous_paws at 2:24 AM on May 19, 2018

I'm indifferent to the royals, but do have sympathy for my UK friends and MeFites about the breathless obsession and fascination for the US re: their weddings and whatever else they do. I mean, they are footing half the bill for this through their taxes. That's absurd. In any case, yes, MeFi is a US-centric site and this event is one of those things that throw that into sharp relief. Aside from my comment about my mom thinking we had this weekend off because of the Royal Wedding (we don't!), I have opted to step out because I don't get it.
posted by Kitteh at 2:45 AM on May 19, 2018 [7 favorites]

I object to the fact they're caling a 22 degree celcius day a scorcher.
posted by b33j at 2:53 AM on May 19, 2018 [15 favorites]

*pouts*
No one ever seems to remember that we have a royal family, too.
posted by Too-Ticky at 3:07 AM on May 19, 2018 [5 favorites]

A little reminder to all Brits and Americans discussing this here: the wedding is being covered and live-streamed on national tv and the internet in many countries across the entire world. So maybe do keep that in mind, and try not to assume much about the reasons why people would be watching across the world, and try not to reduce it all to an issue of political comparisons between the US and the UK and specific attitudes towards the monarchy or whatever. Just a thought!
posted by bitteschoen at 3:49 AM on May 19, 2018 [10 favorites]

it is obviously an entertainment spectacle for at least some UK members as well. Many people in the UK would probably disagree that it is political at all..

Many people across the world, too! Including countries that never had a monarchy or had it and abolished it and have zero monarchist inclinations. Most people across the world would likely not associate this kind of event to political aspects of the monarchy and its history, or comparing this to any public event involving political leaders. (Especially as this time political leaders were deliberately not even invited.)
posted by bitteschoen at 3:59 AM on May 19, 2018 [2 favorites]

I introduced a comparison between the US and UK to try to demonstrate the double standard inherent in the moderation approach on that thread to the predominantly US membership.

Whether someone does or doesn't perceive the political elements of the royal wedding does not stop it being political. The more people buy into it globally the greater the enablement of the status quo in the UK.

On a different note, here are Chewbacca's thoughts on today's FA Cup final.
posted by biffa at 4:12 AM on May 19, 2018 [7 favorites]

Whether someone does or doesn't perceive the political elements of the royal wedding does not stop it being political. The more people buy into it globally the greater the enablement of the status quo in the UK.

Okay... agree to disagree, I understand your point of view but I would argue it’s a very restrictive one and I would argue against the implication that anyone watching globally is "buying into it" or enabling anything by simply watching the celebration, and how that implication itself sounds a bit snobbish to me, but I don’t want to get into an argument right now especially as the sermon is being broadcast - and oh wow, I think it’ll be interesting for everyone who wants to discuss the political or social implications of this event to check back about that later, because that sermon was QUITE something.
posted by bitteschoen at 4:39 AM on May 19, 2018 [10 favorites]

I think it's ostensibly a restrictive point of view to imply that other people's views are being snobbish. The worst kind of politics is that which tries to conceal itself.
posted by polymodus at 5:26 AM on May 19, 2018 [2 favorites]

I'm a snob for being opposed to a system rooted in wealth, privilege and birth right? I can see why you wouldn't want to get too far into that argument.
posted by biffa at 5:29 AM on May 19, 2018 [13 favorites]

It was of course only a matter of time until those complaining about vast hereditary wealth and power were reminded that they, in fact, were the real snobs.
posted by ominous_paws at 5:30 AM on May 19, 2018 [25 favorites]

It was of course only a matter of time until those complaining about vast hereditary wealth and power were reminded that they, in fact, were the real snobs.

Heh, that’s cute, except that’s quite a gross misreading of what I had written. What I find a bit snobbish, as someone belonging to those masses casually watching this on tv from lands far far away from both the UK and the US, is implying that simply by watching we’re "buying into it" and contributing to the "enablement of the status quo in the UK"... Sure feel free to go on all you want about the stupidity of the masses enjoying mass tv entertainment but that’s all it is for most people watching this on tv globally, really.

But others have already made this point better than I have, because it is the entire reason for moderating that thread - the separation of the ceremony as televisual enjoyment for the masses, however silly and superficial, from the political discussions about the role of the monarchy and whatnot.
posted by bitteschoen at 5:47 AM on May 19, 2018 [13 favorites]

I got about halfway through this thread, maybe to the nazi part, and then I realized it's a beautiful Saturday morning and what the fuck am I doing reading this junk? I'm going to be 54 years old next week; I don't want to waste any more time. I'll think I'll go away until next year's Eurovision Song Contest. Y'all take care.
posted by JanetLand at 5:58 AM on May 19, 2018 [27 favorites]

Thank you to Cortex and the mods for helping to keep the Royal Wedding thread enjoyable. It was a treat!
posted by kimberussell at 6:11 AM on May 19, 2018 [12 favorites]

quite the contrary, I’m being forced not to comment in there.

This is untrue. I imagine if you had something appropriate to say, you'd be welcome to comment. You're not being forced not to comment in that thread, just not to shit in it. Metafilter has always worked this way. I have nothing good to say about royal weddings so I just steered clear as soon as I saw that this was going to be a celebratory rather than critical conversation.

One of the best things I've learned from MetaFilter, and which I try to carry forward into my wider life, is the idea that my opinions are not always relevant or welcome—even if I technically would be within my rights to state them—and that that's OK. As a white male I was trained from birth to expect that people should listen to and be respectful of my opinions whenever I felt like expressing them. Turns out that's actually super obnoxious and not how most people operate. MetaFilter helps train me to be a better conversationalist, including by teaching me when the best move I can make is to say nothing.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 6:15 AM on May 19, 2018 [63 favorites]

"shut up and curtsey" it is, then?
posted by ominous_paws at 6:16 AM on May 19, 2018 [6 favorites]

Spectacle has always been a primary means to soften people's feelings about inequality. It has been odd to see so many people whose equality bona fides I respect squeeing about a royal wedding here on Metafilter.

But then I realize that I enjoy my own inequality-enforcing spectacles without thinking about them too much, so I won't be the first to throw stones.

(Okay, maybe I'll throw a pebble or two in the works, and I generally appreciate it when people who see what's problematic about what I enjoy do the same for me.)

Trump is an interesting comparison for me, but from a spectacle rather than monarchical point of view. He has spent his life trying to surround his name with an aura of class and spectacle. The difference between him and the royal family is, I'd suggest, that he has only enchanted lower class Americans, while the royals have also enchanted well-educated middle class Americans.
posted by clawsoon at 6:34 AM on May 19, 2018 [9 favorites]

No, just don't crap all over other people's nice time. It's been said repeatedly that if folks want to have a thread that's more critical of the royal wedding, they're free to put one together. People right here in this thread are being critical of the royal wedding, and that's fine too. Just don't go into the party thread and take a big ol' dump because you just can't help yourself, and then act all shocked and offended when a mod cleans up your turd and gives you a mild scolding.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 6:34 AM on May 19, 2018 [27 favorites]

(The above was a response to ominous_paws' "shut up and curtsey" comment.)
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 6:36 AM on May 19, 2018 [1 favorite]

Not quite this exactly, but we actually do mod football posts that are like "woooooo Superbowl!" and a bunch of people want to come and be like, "Football causes brain damage and nobody should watch it and PS it's super-racist."

Football was exactly what came to mind for me too. The brain damage, the racism and also the amount of domestic abuse connected with the superbowl and alcohol consumption. And, here in the US we make decisions to buy into that whole machine every day. With this wedding, again in the USA, I feel like the main good thing is it just wasn't as hideous as Diana's wedding to Charles, with all the power imbalance that involved. And there's old Prince Charles sitting in the audience, a man who tricked a young woman into marrying him and will someday be king. That his sons married women who are adults, and have been upfront about some of their issues, is progress I guess? But sitting in the US making fun of the royal family's dysfunction may not be a good look, considering who we have in power.
posted by BibiRose at 6:42 AM on May 19, 2018 [2 favorites]

I agree with most of what you say, clawsoon but take exception to this:

>The difference between him and the royal family is, I'd suggest, that he has only enchanted lower class Americans

though I guess it depends on what you define as "lower class Americans".

Trump’s victory also relied on the support of the middle-class, the better-educated and the well-off. Of the one in three Americans who earn less than $50,000 a year, a majority voted for Clinton. A majority of those who earn more backed Trump.

There are plenty of well educated, well-off people who supported and still support trump.
posted by GregorWill at 7:00 AM on May 19, 2018 [5 favorites]

On the one hand, it's easy enough to skip threads where your opinion is going to be seen as the turd in the punchbowl. There are definite advantages to reduced friction and clearly many people want that.

But on the other hand, it creates separated, siloed, and less varied conversations -- e.g., "yay wedding!" over here, "wedding-critical" over there -- which is on aggregate less interesting and less engaging than more multifaceted conversations, to me at least.

The tl;dr being, I understand the why and the advantages of this approach, but I see net disadvantages as well.
posted by Dip Flash at 7:18 AM on May 19, 2018 [10 favorites]

Another thank you to the moderators. I paid the happy couple zero attention up until now and I might not have watched the wedding if this thread hadn't appeared, but I'm glad I did. I'm now interested to see what Meghan does with her new position. I don't think she's there to make babies somehow.

I'm hardly the Firm's biggest fan, but I rather think we're stuck with them until we figure out a way of disposing of them, humanely or otherwise. In the meantime, their interventions in the panoply of popular culture are sometimes noteworthy, and this particular one was fascinating. In the bread-and-circuses scheme of things, there can be no clearer statement of the relationship between wealth, class, celebrity spectacle and social mobility in our current era than the union of Meghan and Harry. Also, great dress.

I'll be honest though, I have a fair amount sympathy for my fellow Brits who find all the fawning objectionable, and yes, much of the media commentary has been cringeworthy. I do think it's worth remembering that for many of us, our royal family isn't just a cultural export, it's a symbol of the same oppression that the rest of the world suffered under colonial rule, and that it continues in our increasingly fractured society.

Also keep in mind that this beautiful ceremony, held in honour of one of the richest families in the world, was largely funded by the British taxpayer. Her Majesty's Treasury must have decided to blow it all on a big party before the Brexit bill comes in or the NHS collapses or whatever crisis comes next.
posted by Elizabeth the Thirteenth at 7:19 AM on May 19, 2018 [14 favorites]

But on the other hand, it creates separated, siloed, and less varied conversations -- e.g., "yay wedding!" over here, "wedding-critical" over there -- which is on aggregate less interesting and less engaging than more multifaceted conversations, to me at least.

I think this is a valid point of view, but I disagree. Sometimes when there are two competing viewpoints in a thread, the discussion can devolve into a first-principles argument about which position is correct. This can easily drown out the deeper, more nuanced perspectives that exist within both viewpoints. I mean, the actual Royal Wedding thread that I just poked my head into looks pretty light-hearted and fluffy (which is fine) but there are lots of topics that lend themselves to deeper insights around here but for which those insights aren't shared when the thread is just an argument.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 7:30 AM on May 19, 2018 [4 favorites]

(I do feel honoured to have gotten a favourite from Wordshore for my snarkiest comment in the main thread. I assume it was because I successfully pulled of a quintessentially British insult that sounds like a compliment.)

Your comment (also flagged as fantastic) hit the perfect intersection of insult, snark and factually correct statement. It's the kind of sophisticated comment that MetaFilter does well, and other sites very rarely. Lots of other good comments in the thread too, and in this thread which has been useful, and elsewhere online.

The general shock or surprise of British Royal Tradition being blindsided by Black Culture today is interesting and entertaining to watch as it still rolls around online and on TV. As one tweet says:

This is the most subversive #royalwedding I can think of. Outspoken biracial royal wife, black preacher talks of social justice, black choir sings gospel version of "Stand by Me". It's small, but it's stunning. Diana would surely be thrilled.

This tweet by @GIsabelle_ a good summary too:

1. Meghan's mom rocking her locks
2. Black pastor finishing his speech with a ML King quote
3. Black Choir (lead by a black woman) singing Stand By Me & Let it Shine
4. Cellist @ShekuKM's performance
5. Idris Elba ❤️ #WEMADEIT #RoyalWedding

Yeah, the performance by the Cellist alone who is suddenly one of the most well-known musicians on the planet (good) made it worth the watch for me.

Just finished re-reading the sermon which was wild. Dr Martin Luther King Jr., who came here by car, and mention of Instagram in the same sermon? That ... is not the traditional Church of England (thankfully).

Anyway, as @Goss30Goss tweeted:

Enjoy your Saturday.

Spend time with family.
Watch coverage of #RoyalWedding
Get away from negativity.

I promise you the Trumpfuckery will be here when you get back.

Right; summer. Outside...
posted by Wordshore at 8:02 AM on May 19, 2018 [17 favorites]

"No one ever seems to remember that we have a royal family, too."

Queen Máx is my favorite!

She's a teeeeeeeeny bit less fun now that she's queen and her behavior is more buttoned up, but she's still my favorite. And all those glorious clothes!
posted by Eyebrows McGee (staff) at 8:08 AM on May 19, 2018 [4 favorites]

This is why I stay off metafilter most of the time these days. I'm a Catholic in Northern Ireland so by rights I should be "allowed" to barge into that thread all "700 YEARS OF OPPRESSION FUCK CROMWELL (Oliver) ETC!", but good God life is fucking short. Let the people who want to have a nice time watching a genuine spectacle have their fun. I promise you, the monarchy would not have been magically overthrown if Hazza and Megs had got hitched in a registry office in Barnstaple. Let them bloody be and let the people who give a shit give a shit in peace. And y'all should count yourself lucky. I'm on a UK-based forum that has less strict posting rules than MF and there are currently countless threads on the front page about every detail - one about the dress, one about the minster, one about her Mum, at least two separate ones about individual guests (!), eleventy billion all week about all the walking-down-the-aisle permutations... I stay out of all of them too at no risk to myself, and without a gaping hole where my incisive commentary should be (forced not to comment? Seriously?). Begrudging people one tiny corner of the site to squee about this stuff is kinda sad. That's my commemorative shilling's worth.
posted by billiebee at 9:00 AM on May 19, 2018 [43 favorites]

billiebee: I promise you, the monarchy would not have been magically overthrown if Hazza and Megs had got hitched in a registry office in Barnstaple.

That would've made for an interesting spectacle all its own.

I bet some royalists would've acted as if the monarchy had been overthrown.
posted by clawsoon at 9:22 AM on May 19, 2018 [3 favorites]

I bet a Jacobin staffer walks into the office on Tuesday morning and says, "Didn't you love Meghan's dress??" and is greeted with shocked silence.

(...and then, later in the day, receives a 12,000 word screed on the evils of monarchy.)
posted by clawsoon at 9:27 AM on May 19, 2018 [5 favorites]

Charles and Camilla were married in a registry office and the monarchy didn't fall then. If it's good enough for Frasermoo it's good enough for the Royal Family.
posted by jacquilynne at 9:41 AM on May 19, 2018

Yeah, the shame of my “forced not to comment” line is making my post-pub-quiz hangover even worse.
posted by gnuhavenpier at 10:07 AM on May 19, 2018 [7 favorites]

I dunno about threads being generally shit free. I've seen some where there is so much shit I figure "eh, what's one more shit on the pile at this point? At least mine will add a distinctive color to the mix"

What I'm saying is, some threads can only benefit from a beetroot-infused shit from time to time.

Take for example, this one.
posted by some loser at 10:56 AM on May 19, 2018 [1 favorite]

Metafilter as a unicorn-fueled hotbed of neo-reaction.
posted by clawsoon at 11:23 AM on May 19, 2018 [1 favorite]

jacquilynne: Charles and Camilla were married in a registry office and the monarchy didn't fall then.

Interesting! That surely wasn't a high point for the monarchy, though, was it? Like, what was the ratio of "useless parasites" grumbling vs. "what a wonderful occasion!" celebrating for that event compared to this one?
posted by clawsoon at 11:39 AM on May 19, 2018

I'm just happy I was able to spend half an hour on the internet without having to say 'you fuckers' even once. Thanks, Cortex and mods, for that.
posted by still_wears_a_hat at 11:49 AM on May 19, 2018 [2 favorites]

Only 1,600 words. I'm disappointed, Jacobin.
posted by clawsoon at 12:03 PM on May 19, 2018 [4 favorites]

(To be clear, what I enjoyed was not being reminded of things like politics, politicians, economics, or reality.)
posted by still_wears_a_hat at 12:08 PM on May 19, 2018

still_wears_a_hat: (To be clear, what I enjoyed was not being reminded of things like politics, politicians, economics, or reality.)

So then you came over to the complaining thread because you couldn't help it? :-)
posted by clawsoon at 12:12 PM on May 19, 2018 [2 favorites]

I'm here to demand equal griping about all other antiquated symbols of Britain! Down with everything!
posted by pracowity at 12:34 PM on May 19, 2018 [3 favorites]

Yeah, the shame of my “forced not to comment” line is making my post-pub-quiz hangover even worse.

I'm torn because I really don't want to pick on you for this, but I really want this to be the new "silenced all my life". The internet makes us bad people.
posted by bongo_x at 1:13 PM on May 19, 2018 [17 favorites]

I'm here to demand equal griping about all other antiquated symbols of Britain! Down with everything!

Obligatory Pop Will Eat Itself:

There's warning of the storming, news of the resistance
The peasants are revolting, advancing from the distance
There's panic and there's anarchy and breaking the rules
They're making fake money and they're taking the jewels

What will it be? Funky!

I've always enjoyed the fact that song uses a sample from Sabotage.
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 1:57 PM on May 19, 2018 [4 favorites]

The difference between him and the royal family is, I'd suggest, that he has only enchanted lower class Americans

Yeah no. Trump is popular with a certain swath of lower-class white Americans - notably more so than usual for a Republican - but his real base is the same as the usual for the party.
posted by atoxyl at 2:31 PM on May 19, 2018 [2 favorites]

While we're at it. Cats: are they really so cute? Shave off their fur & they're really pretty ugly. Would it really be so wrong to simply point this out in one (or every) "cute cat video" thread? If someone had been brave enough to stand up for sanity way back when when Cat Scan was posted, we might not be in the thralls of insipid cat lovers today.
posted by scalefree at 3:38 PM on May 19, 2018 [6 favorites]

While we're at it. Cats: are they really so cute?

...what with all the birds they kill? (Not to mention the goats.)
posted by clawsoon at 3:53 PM on May 19, 2018 [2 favorites]

Sometimes I think like the GoT FanFare threads have "book spoilers" and "no book spoilers" versions, MeFi threads should have "fighting" and "less fighting" versions.

... I really kinda want this pony, although in this specific instance I'm more on Team 'It Should've Been On Fanfare.'
posted by mordax at 4:16 PM on May 19, 2018 [10 favorites]

...what with all the birds they kill? (Not to mention the goats.)

You can count me among Team Bird actually. My dad had a budgie named Petey in his bachelor days, it may have started in his stories about him.
posted by scalefree at 4:56 PM on May 19, 2018

Cats: are they really so cute? Shave off their fur & they're really pretty ugly.

I love sphynxes and will not hear this.

Count me in as another one who thinks it could've been on FanFare. It already partly justifies itself by the potential of titling it The Royal FanFare.
posted by solarion at 5:27 PM on May 19, 2018 [4 favorites]

...what with all the birds they kill? (Not to mention the goats.)

my goat was killed by our hogs.
posted by I'm Not Even Supposed To Be Here Today! at 6:02 PM on May 19, 2018 [1 favorite]

Hogs are monsters. Like, literal baby-eating monsters.

Monsters.
posted by aramaic at 7:28 PM on May 19, 2018

The difference between him and the royal family is, I'd suggest, that he has only enchanted lower class Americans, while the royals have also enchanted well-educated middle class Americans.

Trump and class have very little to do with one another. He enchanted white Americans, period. It is easy to pretend he's only beloved in trailer parks, but suburban white people gave him their votes, too. Meanwhile he did not attract the votes of POC, irrespective of income. I also think there's a difference between being attracted to something because it encourages positive feelings (like you see around the wedding) and being attracted to something because it validates your hate and fear (like everything Trump does).

I'm one of those too-cool-for-school "I don't really care about the wedding" people, but I still really appreciate the mods' decision that sometimes we can have nice things.
posted by Anonymous at 8:13 PM on May 19, 2018

I'm glad this MetaTalk is here, because it's super interesting. I would have (and did) just ignored the wedding post, though I'm sure it was well written and I'm happy for those enjoying it.
posted by sacchan at 12:24 AM on May 20, 2018 [3 favorites]

It's geese you have to watch out for and so they unsurprisingly featured very little in this nuptial occasion. An important lesson for us all.
posted by h00py at 2:20 AM on May 20, 2018 [3 favorites]

aramaic: Hogs are monsters.

Another example for my half-baked theory that we most loathe the species which most resemble us. (Pigs, like us: Opportunistic, intelligent, ruthless, adaptable.)
posted by clawsoon at 4:23 AM on May 20, 2018 [1 favorite]

Correction taken on who Trump enchanted. Perhaps "the Metafilter set" and "not the Metafilter set" would've been a better dividing line.
posted by clawsoon at 4:25 AM on May 20, 2018

(I should've also clarified that I think the enchanting was mostly well before the election, when Trump was establishing his gold-plated brand as "a classless person's idea of what a classy person looks like." The royals, with centuries of experience in this sort of thing, have had much more success convincing classy people that they're the epitome of class.)
posted by clawsoon at 4:31 AM on May 20, 2018

Because class was defined for so long by proximity to the Royals, they had an unfair advantage.

(I'll root for Ivanka yet, pleb that I am)
posted by tirutiru at 5:31 AM on May 20, 2018

I think Lobster’s point helped me understand best what’s going on here. To describe what I worked out due to reading this Meta:

Each post has a framing, a tone. “Royal wedding; cool, eh?” and “rude, eh?” and “economics troubling” and “just the facts” are four different trajectories for conversations to follow. None of them are particularly compatible with each other as a framing; joy, rage, worry, chaos.

When someone I know is excited about something in a certain way, I try to fit my reply within the general framing they use. If I care deeply against whatever they’re excited for, I’ll offer one sentence indicating so, and they’ll stop talking about it with me. If I’m neutral, I smile and nod.

This doesn’t scale properly to forum threads, because with tens of thousands of users, if everyone offers one sentence we’ll never be able to be excited about anything. So for the “royal wedding; cool, eh?” post, expressing curiosity and joy in the wedding itself, trying to add comments about “royal wedding; rude, eh?” is like telling someone they’re wrong to be excited, in a thread where they’re excited.

The sports analogy here would be asking someone whose team just won a game by 1 point “what about the concussion scandals, how can you be happy?!”. You could do so, but most people I know wouldn’t do so to a friend, not when they’re excited and happy. They might do so the next day, though; I probably would send a link to remind them that it’s not all roses.

So in MeFi terms, if the post’s framing of a topic is “whoah, cool!”, and you think that the framing is wrong, you can submit a post with the correct framing as you think it should be. As with the sports analogy, none of us want to be told in reply to a post “you are wrong to feel XYZ about ABC”, but arguing the framing of a post within that post comes across exactly that way to human emotions.

Activism is often implemented such that any time a topic comes up with any framing, it must be reframed into the activist’s desired framing. On this forum, I believe it’s clear that the mods desire reframing to occur through “post your own FPP” rather than “reframe someone else’s FPP”. I wouldn’t be so willing to agree to “new framing? new FPP” if they weren’t wide open, but this is MeFi, so they are, and so I do.

Do I grok this correctly? (Anti-Heinlein activists, link me an FPP about “grok is bad!”, I might agree!)
posted by crysflame at 8:51 AM on May 20, 2018 [7 favorites]

Going out of your way to not yuck other people's yum is a great thing, when it comes to movies, art projects, and terrible pop music. Applied to the elite leaders of a national empire that claims to rule by devine right, it's a very different and intensely political choice. Celebrating propriety and civil discourse above all else is a legitimate option, but it's not one that's likely to land on one the right side of history. It saddens me to add "criticism of royalty" to the growing list of topics too controversial to discuss in earnest here.
posted by eotvos at 11:05 AM on May 20, 2018 [11 favorites]

If you're so poor at reading comprehension as to get that impression from this thread, it's probably safer for you to assume everything is on that list.
posted by the agents of KAOS at 11:14 AM on May 20, 2018 [11 favorites]

Celebrating propriety and civil discourse above all else is a legitimate option, but it's not one that's likely to land on one the right side of history.

Ask me how I know you didn't pay attention to what happened at that particular wedding yesterday.

It saddens me to add "criticism of royalty" to the growing list of topics too controversial to discuss in earnest here.

Your comment isn't in earnest, nor is your sadness real.
posted by Celsius1414 at 11:20 AM on May 20, 2018 [11 favorites]

If you're so poor at reading comprehension as to get that impression from this thread, it's probably safer for you to assume everything is on that list.

There is literally no content in this comment beyond "nyah nyah you are dumb".
posted by ominous_paws at 11:21 AM on May 20, 2018 [9 favorites]

Your comment isn't in earnest, nor is your sadness real.

Sounds like a good time to bow out of this discussion. I hope everyone who sees more value in the wedding than I do is right and it makes the world a better place.
posted by eotvos at 11:42 AM on May 20, 2018

If you're so poor at reading comprehension as to get that impression from this thread, it's probably safer for you to assume everything is on that list.

Don't be a dick.

Your comment isn't in earnest, nor is your sadness real.

ibid

It saddens me to add "criticism of royalty" to the growing list of topics too controversial to discuss in earnest here.

I think this is an unreasonable overstatement of the situation, is my basic thing. Criticism of royalty is fine, and has happened before and will happen again on MetaFilter, because there's all kinds of shit to criticize. Universalizing "hey, take it easy on lazily doing x in this particular thread" to "never have a nuanced discussion of x" is fallacious and isn't gonna carry this discussion forward.

I am sympathetic toward the feeling of "hey, this isn't something I can just look past and Enjoy The Fun on". I think that's a reasonable reaction! But I also think taking that as a cue to skip a particular thread is a healthy choice and a reasonable community-minded expectation. Just as with all the other problematic stuff that people like aspects of.

There's a lot of problematic shit out there, and MeFi's not in general lacking for discussion of how and why it's problematic; I 100% guarantee you there will be naturally occurring opportunities in the future to talk about how and why the British monarchy and it's traditions and priorities are all kinds of a damn mess.
posted by cortex (staff) at 11:43 AM on May 20, 2018 [18 favorites]

I am sympathetic toward the feeling of "hey, this isn't something I can just look past and Enjoy The Fun on". I think that's a reasonable reaction! But I also think taking that as a cue to skip a particular thread is a healthy choice and a reasonable community-minded expectation.

Fair points, and I appreciate the challenging position the staff here face. I have great fondness and respect for both the community and the mods, even if some specific decisions rankle. I'm sincerely sorry for poisoning the discussion with what may have been a needlessly hyperbolic statement.
posted by eotvos at 11:46 AM on May 20, 2018

There is literally no content in this comment beyond "nyah nyah you are dumb".

That's not true at all - if you took the comment literally, there was also a suggestion that they don't try and participate here too much. My assumption, same as Celsius and cortex, was that they didn't actually believe what they said, and so the comment was better read as "that is a stupid thing to say".
posted by the agents of KAOS at 11:47 AM on May 20, 2018

My assumption, same as Celsius and cortex

It's an audacious bit of judo to present needing to be told by a mod not to be a dick as "see, cortex agrees with me", fwiw.
posted by cortex (staff) at 11:55 AM on May 20, 2018 [19 favorites]

I realize that a mod comment doubling down on telling someone not to be a dick is unlikely to be posted to the front page sidebar, but flagged as fantastic.
posted by ActingTheGoat at 12:06 PM on May 20, 2018 [4 favorites]

I think this is an unreasonable overstatement of the situation, is my basic thing.

so, cortex agrees with me and thinks I was a dick in the way I said it. Better? Jesus.
posted by the agents of KAOS at 1:10 PM on May 20, 2018

On close re-read, I guess you didn't say the user probably didn't believe their own comment, you just said it was unreasonable and fallacious.
posted by the agents of KAOS at 1:15 PM on May 20, 2018

It might be worth considering how many comments you wish to make in service of angrily arguing with people about precisely what kind of dick you are being.
posted by ominous_paws at 2:13 PM on May 20, 2018 [17 favorites]

This whole thread is pretty shitty and I certainly wasn't helping with a sarcastic response to what felt like yet another 'silenced all my life' over-reaction, and even cortex can't always avoid the clever but disingenuous knee-jerk response in snappish threads.

That said, the best part of the entire royal wedding was that my three year old nephew was drawn into watching the ceremony by the mentions of "trains" and now has an opinion on wedding dress trains, so I think it was all worth it.
posted by the agents of KAOS at 2:42 PM on May 20, 2018 [4 favorites]

cortex: I also think taking that as a cue to skip a particular thread is a healthy choice and a reasonable community-minded expectation.

And if I can manage it, it can't be that hard.
posted by Too-Ticky at 2:53 PM on May 20, 2018 [2 favorites]

So we raised hogs for a cycle of fair/ffa/etc. I loved them. They were very lovely, really. They got out of the pin a lot but never went far because they knew where dinner was. Sometimes they'd break the fence just to show they could, then pile all up for a big nap. Except one exceptionally sweet lady pig. Any time a hole in the fence appeared you could be assured that the next morning she'd be blocking our egress on the front porch with our equally sweet chow-chow, bear. They LOVED hanging out and snuggling and just generally being pals. When came time to do what needs must on a farm, Bear looked everywhere for that pig. He was sad for a couple days but boy did he love the scraps. Maybe pigs aren't the only monsters.

He also helped a cat who adopted us (after our cat knocked her up and ran off) raise her 7 kittens. He was just a cross-species sweetheart.
posted by I'm Not Even Supposed To Be Here Today! at 3:44 PM on May 20, 2018 [6 favorites]

SOME PIG
posted by zarq at 7:05 PM on May 20, 2018 [13 favorites]

My nieces were very excited about the royal wedding because it involved princesses. So that was kind of adorable. Given they’re 3 and 5, I’m not sure how they actually knew about it.

Hate on the royals all you want, just make a new royals hating thread. It’s not a big ask. Make it about how racist Prince Phillip is or something. That’s a deep well.
posted by His thoughts were red thoughts at 3:41 AM on May 21, 2018 [6 favorites]

Shutting down UK political discussion in a thread which to all intents and purposes is about UK politics reinforces the idea that MeFi is a US site for US people, that our country's culture is just entertainment and those of us from outside the US are just guests here.

As a non-UK person living in the UK and one who has no reason to be favourably inclined towards the British establishment, this is absolutely the impression I get from almost all of coverage of UK-focused stuff on metafilter.

The mods' actions in not wanting anyone's yum being yukked are, on the face of it, reasonable but do serve as a reminder that Metafilter just isn't somewhere I can go for much beyond a surface-level 'tea and biscuits!' cutesy view of Britain. Part of this is simply a numbers game when it comes to membership - where US concerns override everything else - but it doesn't feel good seeing otherwise cool and sensible people put their own desire for enjoying a glitzy spectacle above any negative views from folks who actually have to deal with the implications in their lives.

I know that my constantly-receding-into-the-future marriage will take place in a literal hostile environment and I consider myself lucky. It's like... US politics are serious business but we can always look at the UK for a fun, disinterested time where their ruling class at least plays dress-up once in a while.

An enterprising UK mefi certainly could put together a post about how the wedding isn't an apolitical event, it's a public demonstration of some of the nastiest hypocrisies underlying this vicious bloody country but odds are it will either sink without getting a huge amount of attention (again, numbers game), wind up with excessive focus on the tweeness of it all, or end up getting derailed into talking about US issues. UK mefis do good shit and this isn't a slight against them or their threads but even this meta post has wound up delving into the well-worn details of Trump's demographic base, more than the initial comparison warranted.

Metafilter just isn't where I'd go looking for the same level of broadly sensible discussion applied to the UK (or Ireland or Europe or most of the world) as to the US. I can't see how that is realistically going to change.
posted by ocular shenanigans at 5:24 AM on May 21, 2018 [28 favorites]

A mod should not preemptively determine the course of a thread. That’s just mod overreach.
posted by Don.Kinsayder at 5:38 AM on May 21, 2018

I flagged every comment I felt like was threadshitting, especially the early ones that were just knee jerk grar. I don't think the mods determined it, I think they were reacting to flags and decided it was ok to just have a "ooh pretty dresses" thread. Then this thread was allowed through the queue. So everyone got to say their peace.
posted by I'm Not Even Supposed To Be Here Today! at 5:51 AM on May 21, 2018 [6 favorites]

"Shutting down UK political discussion in a thread which to all intents and purposes is about UK politics reinforces the idea that MeFi is a US site for US people, that our country's culture is just entertainment and those of us from outside the US are just guests here."

As a non-UK person living in the UK and one who has no reason to be favourably inclined towards the British establishment, this is absolutely the impression I get from almost all of coverage of UK-focused stuff on metafilter.

Firmly seconded. Somewhere in the range of twenty to thirty million quid in public money for security, on top of the economic cost of the disruption, at a time when budgets are being starved across government. But no, of course this isn't political at all for a bunch of Americans viewing this as another BBC costume drama.
posted by Dysk at 5:52 AM on May 21, 2018 [24 favorites]

The way the thread was moderated might have been a good fit for a fanfare thread, but felt really off for the blue.
posted by Dysk at 5:56 AM on May 21, 2018 [7 favorites]

The mod note near the very beginning of the thread set the rules for discussion.
posted by Don.Kinsayder at 6:00 AM on May 21, 2018

On preview, what Dysk said.
posted by Don.Kinsayder at 6:01 AM on May 21, 2018

An enterprising UK mefi certainly could put together a post about how the wedding isn't an apolitical event, it's a public demonstration of some of the nastiest hypocrisies underlying this vicious bloody country but odds are it will either sink without getting a huge amount of attention (again, numbers game), wind up with excessive focus on the tweeness of it all, or end up getting derailed into talking about US issues.

For whatever it's worth, i think that would be a much more interesting post for MeFi. It would be nice to see on the site. I bet a lot of people would welcome it.

Considering the attention Brexit and UK-politics threads have received from non-US-based MeFites in recent years, quite a few might participate, too.

Any MeFi post runs the risk of being derailed by the limited perspectives of those commenting. Remaining vocal and active in a thread by offering mild corrections and personal knowledge / experience can help counter those voices.

MeFi can only ever be an echo chamber if outside perspectives aren't added to the conversation. Doing so requires (at times, Herculean) patience. But it's totally possible and rewarding.
posted by zarq at 6:03 AM on May 21, 2018 [5 favorites]

The mod note is only at the beginning because multiple flagged things were deleted.
posted by I'm Not Even Supposed To Be Here Today! at 6:03 AM on May 21, 2018

Yes, and the deleting could have occurred without a note. The mods could have deleted knee-jerk comments without forbidding all “negative” talk.
posted by Don.Kinsayder at 6:08 AM on May 21, 2018

I also flagged negative, fight-picky comments as derails right from the start, and was pleased at the mod note that arrived afterward. So don't blame the mods for trying to shape the direction, blame me and possibly other participants for pushing back using the tools we were given.

Because the intent of the post was not to discuss the political and economic ramifications of having a BRF -- there are plenty of other ways and places to do that, if one is so inclined. To come into an extremely well-crafted post that's about the upbeat side of a Thing and hijack it to turn it into a political argument about the downside of that Thing ... eh, that's rude behavior in my book. Make your own FPP, get your own blog, go play on Twitter, etc.
posted by kimberussell at 6:47 AM on May 21, 2018 [7 favorites]

The mods' actions in not wanting anyone's yum being yukked are, on the face of it, reasonable but do serve as a reminder that Metafilter just isn't somewhere I can go for much beyond a surface-level 'tea and biscuits!' cutesy view of Britain. Part of this is simply a numbers game when it comes to membership - where US concerns override everything else - but it doesn't feel good seeing otherwise cool and sensible people put their own desire for enjoying a glitzy spectacle above any negative views from folks who actually have to deal with the implications in their lives.

Yes, thank you for articulating what I was clumsily struggling to voice up thread. I’m fine with people enjoying the wedding. I’m fine with mods guiding a conversation in a specific direction when that seems appropriate. I think it would have been a shame if the thread had been cluttered right out of the gate with this sucks! comments.

What I’m trying to gently challenge is Americans treating another country’s culture like a nice place to vacation in because they’ve had a rough week or because the US is depressing. It’s kind of weird and proprietary and I think given that Mefi has an ongoing problem with being occasionally overbearingly US-centric, maybe something people may want to reflect on, that’s all. People clomping in here to announce that they’re glad they were able to just enjoy someone else’s customs without being made to feel bad just sort of reinforces my original point.
posted by supercrayon at 6:57 AM on May 21, 2018 [33 favorites]

Because the intent of the post was not to discuss the political and economic ramifications of having a BRF -- there are plenty of other ways and places to do that, if one is so inclined.

Threads about the Olympics and football World Cup managed to encompass discussion of the sociopolitical aspects and the corruption of the organisations involved right alongside the celebratory stuff, for example. Obit threads - even those intended to be celebratory - happily include critical attitudes or reminders of the crimes of the beloved deceased.

The attitude of "no negativity here, get your own thread!" is not that usual for metafilter.
posted by Dysk at 7:42 AM on May 21, 2018 [8 favorites]

The attitude of "no negativity here, get your own thread!" is not that usual for metafilter.

To the lament of many FPP posters over the years.
posted by zarq at 8:19 AM on May 21, 2018 [1 favorite]

What I’m trying to gently challenge is Americans treating another country’s culture like a nice place to vacation in because they’ve had a rough week or because the US is depressing.

This is completely fair, and certainly a point worth talking about.
posted by mordax at 8:20 AM on May 21, 2018 [3 favorites]

To me the closest analogy seems to be the issue that arises with certain obituary threads where there's tension between how much critique people are allowed to raise (Barbara Bush's obit, most recently). I'm in favor of letting critiques go there, and I'm in favor of framing something like a royal wedding much more critically than it was--so I guess I echo those who think that it should have been kept off the blue and moved to Fanfare if it was going to be "squee only"; or we need to start indicating "squee only" threads right from the get-go to perhaps skip a step in the usual escalation of tensions.
posted by TwoStride at 8:54 AM on May 21, 2018

One thing I'll note that doesn't seem to have been mentioned yet is that this was a wedding, an inherently celebratory event. I don't presume to speak for the mods, but I imagine a FPP about, say, Harry and Meghan taking a state visit somewhere would have been moderated differently. Obviously weddings can be problematic for numerous reasons (see the wedding tag on Ask, e.g.), but it seems that erring on the side of celebration would be a sensible policy, similar to how respect for the deceased is the default for obituaries.

I'll also note, on the topic of Harry's Nazi costume, that this type of thing is so spectacularly ill-advised that having the subject brought up at every occasion probably shouldn't be surprising. But if he is, in fact, a crypto-racist, he seems to be doing a pretty terrible job.

Finally, I think most of this could have been avoided with a more thorough, even-handed FPP. But everyone here has a story of crafting a perfect FPP only to find that, while they meticulously hunted down detail links and obsessed over diction, someone else had already posted the centerpiece link. I'm not sure if that's what happened here, but it was entirely foreseeable that a squeeing would occur. At the very least, the anti-squee side was caught napping and lost the initiative.
posted by kevinbelt at 9:40 AM on May 21, 2018 [1 favorite]

What I’m trying to gently challenge is Americans treating another country’s culture like a nice place to vacation in because they’ve had a rough week or because the US is depressing. It’s kind of weird and proprietary and I think given that Mefi has an ongoing problem with being occasionally overbearingly US-centric, maybe something people may want to reflect on, that’s all. People clomping in here to announce that they’re glad they were able to just enjoy someone else’s customs without being made to feel bad just sort of reinforces my original point.

Why don't you try gently challenging that by reading what UK posters are writing, instead of just assuming that all of the people enjoying the wedding are American? As usual, see Wordshore for some great work.

This is a complex country with multiple, complex issues all intersecting. ....Of course people familiar with this country are going to want to comment on those issues.

We're so complex that everyone from here wanted the same thing! Wait that doesn't sound right.
posted by the agents of KAOS at 9:58 AM on May 21, 2018 [4 favorites]

Obviously weddings can be problematic for numerous reasons (see the wedding tag on Ask, e.g.), but it seems that erring on the side of celebration would be a sensible policy

This isn't to do with someone with a personal issue around the idea of weddings. The constitutional law of the UK gives the groom a position of power and privilege solely as a result of their birth. Any wedding among the royal family is politically and culturally significant in that it historically has marked a key step towards the continuation of the royal line and effectively the entrenchment of unearned high privilege. This cannot easily be separated from celebration since it is intrinsically political.
posted by biffa at 10:13 AM on May 21, 2018 [5 favorites]

Literally nobody has claimed that all UKites want to complain about the wedding, or that none of them want to enjoy it uncritically. Nobody. And that fact that some do doesn't somehow cleverly invalidate the other side; I'm not sure what you're after here.
posted by ominous_paws at 10:16 AM on May 21, 2018 [8 favorites]

Also, you're still being sort of aggressive and jerkish.
posted by ominous_paws at 10:17 AM on May 21, 2018 [7 favorites]

Threads about the Olympics and football World Cup managed to encompass discussion of the sociopolitical aspects and the corruption of the organisations involved right alongside the celebratory stuff, for example.

For sure. And I think that's a decent target to aim for in general. But we've also on any number of occasions had to go into a thread about e.g. a sporting event and yank out some lazy "football is dumb!" level commentary that doesn't get within reasonable reach of e.g. nuanced sociopolitical discussion. Or non-scorcher obit posts where the critical comment is not so much "here's a problematic thing about their life, though" as it is some disproportionate "burn in hell, fucko!" thing. (And obviously obits for especially disliked people complicate that, it's a whole other conversation, but.) In my eyes it's not a binary thing, not either Zero Negative Commentary or Everybody Get Out The Spiked Bats; some folks did make more elaborated upon critical comments in that thread that, flags and all, I didn't see the need to delete.

If part of the issue here is that my note early in that thread thread was too toasty, that's my bad; it was on the strength of an early, too-predictable crop of contentless gripes in what was a pretty unambiguously framed "hey if you're into the wedding stuff, here's a post about it" effort, people just jumping in to drop a speed-over-quality dump in a brand new thread, and that definitely informed my headspace in how I phrased it.

I'll reiterate that I think there's a degree of reading-the-room here where, basically, it's okay to have really critical opinions about the context of something and to express those in all sorts of possible discussions on the site while still doing the work to recognize that a given one-off thread isn't really framed around that. I recognize and sympathize with a position like "hey, but that's where I'm at, the framing of this post failing to reflect my legitimate criticisms doesn't make those criticisms invalid"; I think that's a reasonable reaction to have and I can understand folks who are in a pretty critical place re: the royals and the wedding and the internationalizing of the spectacle of something that has all kinds of problematic ties in a local context not being real into Fun Wedding Thread. But I think it's also important to recognize the difference between some notional "no being critical of the British monarchy on MetaFilter" edict and "hey, maybe skip this particular thread if you just want to do low-effort grumping". My aim is for the latter, not the former, which I hopefully have been clear about in my earlier comments in here.

nthing that that's fine for Fanfare, but seems really strange to enforce on an FPP.

This is an interesting development from the existence of FanFare, in terms of site evolution. Because I get that line of thinking and as I said I think it would have been fine as a FanFare special event post (and on the balance here might have been a lower-friction outcome). But at the same time, this isn't a new precedent for the blue; it's a kind of moderation work that has come up now and then on threads on the blue for years and years. When it's a lower-heat context, it ends up being unmemorable if not outright invisible. But to me, from long years doing this, saying "hey, maybe just skip this one if it's bugging you" is old hat, a familiar move to make. It's something worth thinking about I suppose that the existence of FanFare may be steering folks expectations in some cases away from that old standard.
posted by cortex (staff) at 10:19 AM on May 21, 2018 [4 favorites]

Of course people familiar with this country are going to want to comment on those issues.
.....
Literally nobody has claimed that all UKites want to complain about the wedding, or that none of them want to enjoy it uncritically. Nobody.

Could you offer an interpretation of that comment, which I was responding to, that makes your response true?
posted by the agents of KAOS at 10:28 AM on May 21, 2018 [1 favorite]

I totally agree that for my whole time on Mefi (16ish years between accounts) that sometimes the mods are like "sure have fun in here and others just give it a pass or make the thread you want have." And not just about solely recreational activities, but things that touch on all sorts of issues. To my mind it's not a change at all even if other threads have supported entertainment and critical issues simultaneously.

Plus, I mean, this is the last of Diana's kids to get married, and he married a Black Jewish American divorcee actress who is older than him and estranged from one side of her family. I feel confident Princess Eugenie won't get quite the same attention or response at her wedding. The next one that will likely cause this amount of freak out will be William in about 23 years.

So while I sincerely get the complaints and the US-centrism of the site and how that is negative especially for UK mefites as all things royal family come up, it's also pretty much a moot issue as it relates to super high profile celebrity royal weddings, as we've likely seen the last one that will make a splash in quite a while. It's no reason to ignore the issues or not talk about them, but also understanding this particular event is unique might be useful.
posted by I'm Not Even Supposed To Be Here Today! at 11:04 AM on May 21, 2018 [9 favorites]

Could you offer an interpretation of that comment, which I was responding to, that makes your response true?

Uh, just stick the word "some" before "people" in the first comment? If they had meant "all people", they would likely have said "...anyone familiar" or "...everyone familiar" etc.

Maybe a good rule of thumb, when nobly defending Fortress Yaypril, is to be strictly less combative than the Marauding Debbie Downer Hordes would have been had they been allowed to encroach on your territory in the first place.
posted by busted_crayons at 11:08 AM on May 21, 2018 [4 favorites]

"But I think it's also important to recognize the difference between some notional "no being critical of the British monarchy on MetaFilter" edict and "hey, maybe skip this particular thread if you just want to do low-effort grumping". My aim is for the latter, not the former, which I hopefully have been clear about in my earlier comments in here."

If it is so important to recognize the difference between not being critical of the monarchy and just low-effort grumping, it is important to recognize that your note and subsequent modding have not communicated that position well, and have, to a significant number of members, communicated the first as well as the second. As it reads now, many of your comments in this thread seem to be complaining that members should have known what your more nuanced position was rather than accepting that if many people misread your intentions, you may not have been communicating them well, and that if this is a standard that you believe members should be held to, one would expect that you would want to lead by example.

I do appreciate you acknowledging some of that with bits like the "my bad," but with invocations of a norm of members skipping things they don't like (which seems a selective read of MeFi history), it feels like if faced with a similar case, you'd do exactly the same thing, rather than changing your approach. Writing about what you would do differently if you had a second crack at the thread is likely to be more effective in making people with complaints feel like they've been heard, and move forward so that the next time something like this happens, you won't have to make your comments clear in a MeTa thread after the fact.
posted by klangklangston at 11:47 AM on May 21, 2018 [7 favorites]

If it is so important to recognize the difference between not being critical of the monarchy and just low-effort grumping, it is important to recognize that your note and subsequent modding have not communicated that position well

Sure; that's what I was just trying to do in that last comment. I can see how folks could take away a harder guideline from my frustrated initial mod note than I'd intended. Given a time machine I'd have elaborated a little more and probably proactively suggested folks consider putting together a separate thread to boot to be explicit about the idea.

The tricky bit there for me is that my mod note at the time was a reaction to what was actually happening in the thread, not what wasn't; there had been some early lazy comments in there that bear no resemblance to the idea of nuanced criticism folks have subsequently been arguing for making space for. So it'd have been (obvious in retrospect) good to have foreseen the broader argument and accounted for the potential concern there in a preemptive note that captured that. But at the time I was reacting to specific, not-broad, not-worth-arguing-about threadshitting; I let that frame my thinking about, and presentation of, my mod note. A different, more thorough one would probably have at least reduced the sense of frustration for some folks.

but with invocations of a norm of members skipping things they don't like (which seems a selective read of MeFi history)

I hear you in general on the stuff in your comment here, see above, but I'll say I disagree that that's selective in the sense of ignoring site history or context. It's absolutely a component of how threads have been directed, both by mod intervention and by general community policing, for as long as MeFi's been around, and has always been an expectation of community members reading and commenting on the site.

I can totally agree it's complicated for all that and that it doesn't always work out without some entirely understandable friction, but it's a very, very normal part of the MeFi discussion dynamic; every thread tends to be its own thing, some have very different feels than others, and looking at one and making an "am I actually into this one?" decision is something people do every day in the course of their reading and their participation-or-not, thread to thread. That's always gonna be part of the balance of things here, even if it means each of us being personally frustrated some days that the actual thread in front of us isn't the thread we're interested in it being.
posted by cortex (staff) at 12:30 PM on May 21, 2018 [1 favorite]

I’m actually defending fortress “if I can’t moan about UK politics in the ROYAL WEDDING thread then metafilter is Racist against the UK” right now, but thanks for playing. I’m willing to admit that maybe they did mean “some people” and I mistakenly interpreted it as “all people” when I assumed they wanted to say something not completely vacuous. People who want to be understood wouldn’t write like that, of course.
posted by the agents of KAOS at 1:00 PM on May 21, 2018 [2 favorites]

RADIANT
posted by zarq at 1:05 PM on May 21, 2018 [4 favorites]

Yes, I am. People who are familiar with the UK wanted to not have the wedding thread filled with moaning, and are sick of the silly pushback against that very reasonable position.

Also, damn, I think I negatived my fortress name wrong up there.
posted by the agents of KAOS at 1:15 PM on May 21, 2018 [1 favorite]

Well, please stop being a jerk. It's weird that it's an ongoing thing at this point in the same thread and I'm just gonna ask you to check out of this one at this point.
posted by cortex (staff) at 1:20 PM on May 21, 2018 [12 favorites]

Literally nobody has claimed that all UKites want to complain about the wedding

I mean I think we can all agree that the main issue we need to get behind is not allowing "UKites" to happen.
posted by billiebee at 3:44 PM on May 21, 2018 [16 favorites]

I mean I think we can all agree that the main issue we need to get behind is not allowing "UKites" to happen.

What’s sauce for the USian is sauce for the gander.
posted by ActingTheGoat at 4:45 PM on May 21, 2018 [4 favorites]

Two datapoints:

I think there is a difference between being over it and feeling that every time he gets brought up it needs to be with the words "The Cosplaying Nazi" somehow appended to his name.

I am fortunate enough to be FB friends with an British academic political type who regularly posts political discussion threads that have a large taxonomy of in-jokes, whereby certain people are required always to be referred to in a certain way. For example, Liam Fox (happily, for him and him alone, our current Secretary of State For International Trade) is only allowed to be referred to as "Fox, the disgraced ex-minister who resigned in disgrace". This is because he is indeed a disgraced ex-minister who resigned in disgrace - not that it matters to his career as such, the trick is to Not Forget That This Happened, which is otherwise difficult, hence the point of the exercise. In *that* context, referring to a certain Prince of the Realm always and only as 'the cosplaying Nazi' would make complete sense (and I may suggest it there, though I would probably have to first explain what cosplaying was...) Because it doesn't really matter who he was marrying here, this was the cosplaying Nazi's wedding. And some of us are not yet ready to go, oh, boys will be boys, go on with you, never mind, that's just grand.

A second and far more important datapoint for anyone still reading down so far a) in this thread and b) in this comment:

Two women in South Wales staged an event at the same time as the cosplaying Nazi's wedding in which they livestreamed themselves watching paint dry. In dresses. They did. It made the South Wales Argus. Part of the stunt involved raising money for a Windsor-based homeslessness charity; this is the same Windsor where the homeless folk were very recently 'tidied up' prior to the cosplaying Nazi's wedding.

I think anyone reading down this far would agree that this is something well worth supporting, and they are still accepting donations for that particular charity.
posted by motty at 5:36 PM on May 21, 2018 [14 favorites]

UKites

Although I would point to the extenuating circumstance of posting from mobile on a phone with a cracked screen in a rush, and thus being in need of the quickest way to point out that subset of users possible, I take full responsibility for this abuse of the language and apologise for any distress caused.
posted by ominous_paws at 10:08 PM on May 21, 2018 [8 favorites]

Is it because interest in weddings, fashion, jewelry, flower arrangements, cakes, etc. etc. are coded as generally female interests that it is seen as not just worthy but downright required that a thread focused on those things in the context of the royal wedding should be derailed to a discussion of the more sober topics of politics and those who want to focus on all the silly frippery should be consigned to the less-intellectually-rigorous subsite?

I can't speak for everyone else but...no? I do think each subsite has it's own culture, and if I am understanding correctly - people have suggested that maybe in this particular instance the culture of fanfare would have been a better fit for this post. I think that if you want a thread for people to have the space to geek out about something, especially something televised, then fanfare might be a better fit for that. If you want the potential for a broader conversation than Mefi seems to fit better. Also I disagree that fanfare is less intellectually rigorous. I think it's more narrow in how it focuses conversations, but I have read heaps of intelligent critical analysis on fanfare, and heaps of stupid comments on Mefi so I wouldn't say one bit of the site is de facto more given to serious conversation than another.
posted by supercrayon at 12:21 AM on May 22, 2018 [4 favorites]

Can’t some people just be vicariously happy for others and leave it at that?
posted by Kwadeng at 1:29 AM on May 22, 2018 [5 favorites]

I'm coming at this from a biased view, because I remember how much my dad made my mum feel bad about watching Charles and Diana's wedding. And I can't help notice that most of the people complaining about the wedding talk are male. Weddings are traditionally events that women get excited about.

(Pulls out street cred: I actually voted for the republic, and I'm not that fond of the monarchy). But the wedding had bought a lot of joy to people, and isn't that a good thing?
posted by daybeforetheday at 2:13 AM on May 22, 2018 [8 favorites]

people are over that time he cosplayed as a Nazi?

Wait, do you mean Prince Harry here, or Prince Phillip? Because I'm fairly sure that one of those times, it wasn't actually cosplay.

An enterprising UK mefi certainly could put together a post about how the wedding isn't an apolitical event, it's a public demonstration of some of the nastiest hypocrisies underlying this vicious bloody country but odds are it will either sink without getting a huge amount of attention (again, numbers game), wind up with excessive focus on the tweeness of it all, or end up getting derailed into talking about US issues. UK mefis do good shit and this isn't a slight against them or their threads but even this meta post has wound up delving into the well-worn details of Trump's demographic base, more than the initial comparison warranted.

If anyone wants to send some links my way, I'll be happy to throw up an FPP covering a non-positive view of this little taxpayer funded get-together that I'm sure was on every TV in every foodbank across the nation. Or maybe not the wedding, but something royal-bashing, but intelligent royal-bashing, mind. Personally, I think we could have probably done better with this, perhaps keeping intelligent royal-bashing in the thread, but sure, it's a messy situation and that way would probably have been much more mod-heavy.

This thread reminds me of the discussion we had a while-back of how mefi could perhaps do better when it comes to topics originating from outside of the USA. I don't bother with other UK forums, but I would be shocked if the same approach to criticism/negativity were taken there - it's a massive chunk of the context. The "oh look how twee/cute it is" comments absolutely drive me up the wall, because oftentimes these absolutely miss the point of the fucking article. It's often just posting anything for the sake of posting, and that can be positive as well as negative. It actively discourages me from posting on UK and Japan related topics, which is a shame, or if you don't care, a great thing.

But anyway, you know, let's make an intelligent royal-bashing thread. I already have one SLYT ready to go, so link me!
posted by Juso No Thankyou at 2:13 AM on May 22, 2018 [5 favorites]

And I can't help notice that most of the people complaining about the wedding talk are male.

That's a big assumption, and rather erases some of us. We're also not complaining about wedding talk, we're complaining about the limited scope of the wedding talk, and the way that a very widespread UK perspective on what was, after all, a very British event was outright nixed from the get go.
posted by Dysk at 3:17 AM on May 22, 2018 [17 favorites]

And I can't help notice that most of the people complaining about the wedding talk are male. Weddings are traditionally events that women get excited about.

As an observation, very nice. If you want to show me your data to back this up, go right ahead. But, don't you think it's better not to bring this into it? Not only does it play down views that happen to come from uninterested males, it also leaves out those females who couldn't care less too. Sorry about that.
posted by Juso No Thankyou at 4:06 AM on May 22, 2018 [2 favorites]

Not only does it play down views that happen to come from uninterested males, it also leaves out those females who couldn't care less too.

Wow does it make my skin crawl whenever I hear anyone use "females". "Women" works perfectly well.
posted by Dysk at 4:18 AM on May 22, 2018 [15 favorites]

Considering the attention Brexit and UK-politics threads have received from non-US-based MeFites in recent years, quite a few might participate, too.

Quite a few have left recently, and/or significantly reduced their participation (myself included). Why? It gets pretty tiring to be treated as, variously, snobbish, uninformed (generally about the US), misinformed (ditto), harshing the (American, inevitably) vibe, et cetera ad infinitum. Good faith participation of people with different, informed views "rewarded" with remarks that remind me exactly and precisely why I left the US twenty years ago.

Heads getting chopped off, a quintessentially French Revolution image, is brought up time and again, but there's no MeFi thread about the massive strikes still ongoing here in actual current-day France against what French people consider a new iteration of royalty, namely a soulless corporatism invading public services. (Nope, I'm not going to post it, because see above. I have commented about it, though. Feel free to call me a snob - I'm French and live in France, and French people are all snobs, including when they take action against government decisions they don't support, but except when they cut off royal heads, amirite.)

If anyone wants to snark back about France and royalty feel free to remark on the fact that even the downtrodden peasants with literal murderous intent, pitchforks and torches, refused to burn down Versailles. Humanity is vast in its complexity. Nowadays Versailles is part of the public good and anyone can visit, to the difference of Buckingham Palace, which can only be visited in part, and that part is only open ten weeks a year. Have I mentioned the Louvre is rather well-known and visitable as Parisian castles go? I also highly recommend the Place de la Bastille and the Place de la République. Anyway. Excuse my snobbishness offering French socialist views to provide a backdrop of diversity to what's going on in the UK, a diversity that might further enlighten those views that "harsh the vibe".
posted by fraula at 5:44 AM on May 22, 2018 [18 favorites]

I am glad that this thread happened, if only because it made me feel less like I had been wasting everyone's time and it was all in my head when I tried to raise another issue re US perceptions of UK culture/society previously.
posted by Chairboy at 6:27 AM on May 22, 2018 [2 favorites]

Wow does it make my skin crawl whenever I hear anyone use "females". "Women" works perfectly well.

Thanks for saying - I was trying to avoid that kind of clumsiness but didn't spend enough time on it. Apologies for that.
posted by Juso No Thankyou at 6:37 AM on May 22, 2018

Quite a few have left recently, and/or significantly reduced their participation (myself included). Why? It gets pretty tiring to be treated as, variously, snobbish, uninformed (generally about the US), misinformed (ditto), harshing the (American, inevitably) vibe, et cetera ad infinitum. Good faith participation of people with different, informed views "rewarded" with remarks that remind me exactly and precisely why I left the US twenty years ago.

I do feel this gets at the heart of the complaints in this thread, as well as in earlier MeTas by unhappy non-Americans. There is, for better or worse, a very dominant American slant to Metafilter which extends to language and tone and understanding of how the world is, and that tends to stifle participation by those of us from overseas. I've noticed it most with UK discourse, which is generally sharper-edged than American discourse and leads to pile-ons or even moderation, and I do think some of the more abrasive UK commentators who have left often had interesting perspectives that weren't expressed in Heritage Britain cricket-and-crumpets style, or were held to the standards of acceptable US discourse.

But like it or not, much of the Anglophone internet is the American internet, and I don't really see a solution for Metafilter's small corner of it, other than hoping that it will be possible to have greater diversity of viewpoint and national origin amongst the moderators whenever more are hired.

I would also like to add that I am female, holder of a UK passport, don't have strong feelings about whether the monarchy should exist but find it hard to forget that they are where they are today thanks to looting my people (as the bridal veil symbolised so beautifully). For such reasons, I found uncritical squees about wedding festivities amidst austerity, the Grenfell disaster and the Windrush scandal, repellent. I would thank commentators not to imply that those who feel like this are misogynists.
posted by tavegyl at 6:42 AM on May 22, 2018 [25 favorites]

Can’t some people just be vicariously happy for others and leave it at that?

You're totally right, of course. We should be grateful for what we're given, watch the happy people and forget our troubles, both personal and national.

This comes up time and time again and always rubs me the wrong way. It is possible for people to hold several viewpoints and emotions about said viewpoints at the very same time. I can be riotously angry about Brexit and still want to see all those hats and fascinators. I can call for the downfall of American politics and also love where I live. I can absolutely abhor everything about Trump and still be slightly impressed that S. and N. Korea might be reaching some sort of .... something .... maybe possibly thanks to him. I can hold Very Complicated feelings about my father and still be sad that he's going through cancer.

Human beings contain multitudes.
posted by cooker girl at 7:14 AM on May 22, 2018 [21 favorites]

Human beings contain multitudes, as should Metafilter threads.
posted by Don.Kinsayder at 7:41 AM on May 22, 2018 [2 favorites]

But which of the multitude we hear from depends on the moderation.
posted by biffa at 7:43 AM on May 22, 2018 [5 favorites]

I respectfully submit that we may have reached the "going in circles" portion of a MeTa thread.
posted by Chrysostom at 8:21 AM on May 22, 2018 [11 favorites]

That's something I can agree on, disappointingly.
posted by biffa at 8:39 AM on May 22, 2018 [1 favorite]

There is, for better or worse, a very dominant American slant to Metafilter which extends to language and tone and understanding of how the world is, and that tends to stifle participation by those of us from overseas.

This is also something that has gotten more pronounced on metafilter in recent years, in my opinion.
posted by Dysk at 8:42 AM on May 22, 2018 [7 favorites]

(Which would imply that it's less an inevitable fact of life than a consequence of standards and decisions by the community)
posted by Dysk at 8:43 AM on May 22, 2018 [3 favorites]

Haven’t there been discussions about how the big US politics discussions have kind of taken over the site, even outside the megathreads that now account for a disproportionate amount of site attention? Note the many comparisons of bad things to Trump. The world revolves around him.

Count me as someone who was initially on the “let people just have nice things” side; I don’t think I’d have had that reaction if everything else on the site weren’t so dominated by constant gloom over the state of my country and its leadership. Now I wish we could just tone it down everywhere else, but I guess that’s harder to accomplish.

Well if I haven’t said anything useful, I’m at least saying thanks for the perspectives people have shared.
posted by shapes that haunt the dusk at 9:03 AM on May 22, 2018 [6 favorites]

"I hear you in general on the stuff in your comment here, see above, but I'll say I disagree that that's selective in the sense of ignoring site history or context. It's absolutely a component of how threads have been directed, both by mod intervention and by general community policing, for as long as MeFi's been around, and has always been an expectation of community members reading and commenting on the site. "

It's a component, sure, but it conflicts with advice like redeeming weak links with good participation, general prohibition against doubles (as a new post will often be deleted and the poster told to add to a previous one when they're substantially similar in subject), and gets close to the "America! Love it or leave it!" maxims. I don't think that's what you were trying to communicate, but that's a way that framing has been used in the past on MeFi, so I thought it was worth pushing back on.
posted by klangklangston at 2:16 PM on May 22, 2018

I dunno; shitting on anybody's wedding seems kind of churlish to me, unless the two people getting married are awful human beings. Harry's done some dumb stuff in his youth, but he seems to have made up for it. I say give them their day even if we don't like their jobs.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 3:09 PM on May 22, 2018 [6 favorites]

Bashing Oliver Cromwell is fine, you stay off of Thomas

Did something happen to Wee Thomas?

WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO WEE THOMAS YOU BASTARD?!
posted by East14thTaco at 4:20 PM on May 22, 2018

Feel free to call me a snob - I'm French and live in France, and French people are all snobs, including when they take action against government decisions they don't support, but except when they cut off royal heads, amirite.

I'd like to apologize now - my French is even worse than my Italian.
posted by the man of twists and turns at 9:49 PM on May 22, 2018

Personally I noped out of the royal wedding thread the moment I read cortex’s little opener. Winterhill's comment sums up my feelings on this matter, so I'll just repeat it for emphasis:

Shutting down UK political discussion in a thread which to all intents and purposes is about UK politics reinforces the idea that MeFi is a US site for US people, that our country's culture is just entertainment and those of us from outside the US are just guests here.

Being on the receiving end of this kind of cultural appropriation is not the end of the world, but ultimately it reinforces the impression that those of us on the receiving end of it are not really regarded as full people in our own right but rather as tolerated interlopers at best & annoyances at worst.

It's better to have that out in the open I guess.
posted by pharm at 12:06 PM on May 23, 2018 [14 favorites]

I'd like to get on with my intelligent negative FPP. Do I need to wait

- until they get back from their honeymoon?
- until the original post closes for comments?
- until the media shuts up?
- until Wordshore comes back?
- or all of the above?
posted by Juso No Thankyou at 1:27 AM on May 24, 2018

I should add that the mods have done sterling work in keeping "US views are the only ones that really matter" comments out of past Brexit threads, which was perhaps one of the reasons it was so jarring to see the complete reverse here.
posted by pharm at 2:43 AM on May 24, 2018

You're totally right, of course. We should be grateful for what we're given, watch the happy people and forget our troubles, both personal and national.

Well, unhappy people are just going to be unhappy. Last weekend it was the Royal Wedding, next month it will be the World Cup, then it’ll be some other event that we’re not allowed to enjoy because of the “current sorry state of the world”.

It is a rather sad outlook that does not allow for unfettered happiness, lest we forget our personal and national troubles, or perhaps a totalitarian view that would dictate what we’re allowed to enjoy.

The Moderators were right to allow a bitter-free space for those who care enough about hats and fascinators to want to comment, without being berated because Syria (or was it Gaza) was burning at the same time.
posted by Kwadeng at 3:46 AM on May 24, 2018 [3 favorites]

The Moderators were right to allow a bitter-free space for those who care enough about hats and fascinators to want to comment, without being berated because Syria (or was it Gaza) was burning at the same time.

This is disingenuous, dismissive, and frankly mildly insulting. It was not about unrelated horribleness in other parts of the world. It was and is about the negative consequences of the wedding itself and the royal family more generally. This is not about Syria. It's about the UK. It is inherently and unavoidably related.
posted by Dysk at 3:59 AM on May 24, 2018 [16 favorites]

Maybe next time there's a republican convention in the states, or trump decides to shut down the festal government we can have a thread that's protest and bitterness free, because some of us might care enough about media circuses to comment without being berated because some people are suffering in North Korea.

See how insulting erasing the problems of the thing under discussion itself by equating them with concern trolling about irrelevant things is? If Americans can be allowed to protest the awfulness in American events and politics, at should be afforded the same opportunities here.

The wedding was not about Syria. Nobody was a saying you can't celebrate because of something irrelevant. People were trying to say that the very thing you were celebrating is awful in itself, and we entails awfulness. That you are equating British perspectives on the British monarchy with shutting down any happiness in the grounds of irrelevant things in an entirely different part of the world is actually an inadvertently beautiful illustration of exactly the sort of problematic and insulting US-centric attitudes that have developed here lately. US people's discussions of fascinators are more important than British people's views on a British event, in Britain, paid for by the British government, with implications and effects on Britain. Right.
posted by Dysk at 4:08 AM on May 24, 2018 [11 favorites]

It was and is about the negative consequences of the wedding itself and the royal family more generally.

Perhaps when all the hoopla started, someone could have started a discussion about the purpose of Monarchy in the UK?
posted by Kwadeng at 4:23 AM on May 24, 2018 [4 favorites]

Sure, but that would be a different topic to the royal wedding, which is a meaningful thing to examine in its own right through that lens. Our perspectives on the royal wedding are not trash, are not worthless, are not simply us shitting in people's fun just because we might take a negative view. There was a thread on the topic of the royal wedding, and British and critical perspectives should have been welcome there.
posted by Dysk at 4:28 AM on May 24, 2018 [3 favorites]

Like, your argument is still boiling down to "we should de allowed to discuss our fascination with this without having to hear any criticism or about any negative implications from any of the people actually affected" which just, no. We don't let people celebrate offensive humour while banning those at whose expense the jokes are made from participating in the conversation because they might be less jolly, and "but can't they make their own thread?" would do nothing to address such a ban. We don't have threads on political developments where only celebration is allowed, and if people want to talk about how their homes were seized and bulldozed for the new highway overpass, they can make their own dang thread, in here we're wooping about the new transport infrastructure. Why try and insist on that model here?
posted by Dysk at 4:37 AM on May 24, 2018 [7 favorites]

For those of you who care enough about the missing context in the original FPP, I'm just going to leave this here, because I suddenly cannot be bothered to post something to add balance.
posted by Juso No Thankyou at 5:24 AM on May 24, 2018 [4 favorites]

You know, Kwadeng, a lot of us saw your supremely shitty comment in the main thread before it was deleted. To now come in here and say it's great to just have a happy space when you said what you did is pretty freaking rich. Honestly between that comment and your comments in here, it seems like you're just spoiling for a fight. I (obviously) enjoyed the wedding thread but your arguments for it make me want to take the other position.
posted by I'm Not Even Supposed To Be Here Today! at 6:04 AM on May 24, 2018 [2 favorites]

There was a thread on the topic of the royal wedding, and British and critical perspectives should have been welcome there.

Quite a lot of my comments and criticism have been deleted from various threads over the years and I now understand that it is almost never the criticism per se but almost always the way and the tone that are used.

As a non Brit, I know my taxes don’t support the Royal lifestyle and I find comfort in that. Not sure I would have found it very funny were I a subject of the Queen. That being said, and as someone who don’t even think much of the Royals as individuals, I still think they know how to put on a show and I found the ceremony moving. That I even think the marriage won’t last (is that shitty, perhaps) has no bearing on the fact that it was an enjoyable moment.

I just agree with the Mods that at times, venting one’s spleen is best expressed elsewhere. Now bowing out.
posted by Kwadeng at 6:41 AM on May 24, 2018

Have you actually read this thread at all? We've been over this. By many accounts, there was a mod note early on that read as prohibiting any critical comments.
posted by Dysk at 6:43 AM on May 24, 2018 [1 favorite]

I'd like to get on with my intelligent negative FPP. Do I need to wait

You do not need to wait! Obviously nobody is under any obligation to make such a post, but it's also basically fine to put a good one together whenever. Would have been fine a week ago, is fine now, will be fine next week or next month if it's a decent post.
posted by cortex (staff) at 7:43 AM on May 24, 2018 [3 favorites]

Not only do you not need to wait, but when enough quality posts for a given topic reach the front page on the same day, it can end up with a named day on the unofficial Metafilter event calendar!
posted by crysflame at 7:54 AM on May 24, 2018

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