Sally's Journal

Vague ponder.

The “not like the other girls” trope is actually weirdly linked to sexual purity and male control, while desperately pretending to be the reverse. Yes/no?

My answer, by the way, is a sort of ‘maybe, but I might be overthinking it’.

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This is a random review of my Kickstarter experience. No reason for it. Someone just started talking about their own Kickstarter stats and I started reviewing my own spending patterns, and return on investment. Since I’m musing. No one else needs to read my Kickstarter statistics, though. Do they?

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Random and interesting theory.

Human beings are not motivated by being good, or being bad, or being greedy.

Human beings are largely motivated by habit and short cuts. ( Read more... )

Random post of the day, because I was thinking about this. Sometimes I'm moderately snarky about the claims that Scotland is some kind of Utopia and I think I wind up misrepresenting myself as a result.

So, as a spontaneous one off, five things I love about this country. Because Scotland has, overall, been exceptionally kind to me and I do love it here. I just compulsively argue with people when I think they're not quite right. It's a curse. I need help.

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So, I was on a course on communication yesterday. As I’m a charity fundraiser, my course was all about how to communicate with people until they give you money, but as I sat there it occurred to me that I probably ought to be trying to learn more about how to communicate with people the rest of the time too.


And then I thought the rest of you might be interested in it, particularly the stuff about persuading people and bringing them over to your point of view, as I know a lot of you guys are activist types.

1)      Don’t overwhelm with facts. This is definitely my flaw in all online debates. If in doubt, I find a lot of numbers and throw them at the screen. I think this ought to work, but apparently, it actually doesn’t. There have been various studies suggesting that people tend to make an emotional decision first and then look to facts to support that viewpoint. And a quote for you – ‘logic makes people think, emotion makes them act’. So you need a narrative first that clicks with people and then use your facts sparingly to back that up.


2)      A positive narrative has more impact than a negative narrative. There are also studies which show that the bigger and nastier and more overwhelming a problem, the more likely it is that someone will ignore it. Telling anyone that the world is awful is statistically unlikely to get people to stand up and fight and more likely to make them feel a bit crappy and decide to give up on everything and have cake. You need to provide a positive narrative – the normal charity narrative is ‘there is this bad thing. We did the good thing. Now we are on the way to happy ever after’.


3)      Give people a call to action. Generally, 90% of people out there would like to make the world a better place but aren’t quite sure how. This, randomly, is why clicktivism and the like tends to be very successful – it’s a very clearly defined and attainable call to action. And while clicktivism isn’t necessarily hugely successful in terms of impact per person, there are some examples of how it’s achieved an awful lot just through weight of numbers. In financial terms, 10 people giving £100 each are doing a lot more than 10,000 giving £1 each in terms of the cost to each donor. But the £1 donors can sometimes produce more money just through weight of numbers. See – ice bucket challenge, the advertisers pulling out from the Daily Mail etc. So if you can find a call to action every time you engage with someone, even if it’s little, it’s not a bad thing.


4)      No one starts out a major donor. I think this is the same with activism in all its forms. Pretty much no one goes from ‘blindly unexamined privilege and voting for Teresa May’ to ‘manning the barricades’ after one fierce argument on facebook followed up by solitary googling. In fundraising we talk about the donor journey – from suspect (doesn’t really know much about the cause, might be open to hearing it exists) to prospect (isn’t donating, but is interested in finding out more, knows about what we do and supports us in theory) to donor (is donating, usually small and affordable amounts that won’t affect them hugely, may or may not talk about the cause to their friends, but understands our cause and supports us) to major donor (gives significant amounts that may impact on their own finances. Has made a commitment, has made us a priority) to advocate (gives significant amounts of time and money, reaches out to many people in their community on our behalf, has made us a major priority and is a leading figure in the cause). The thing we remember is that we need all of those people in our community – people at every stage of the donor journey. This means that when people fall back or drop off the journey (as is normal) others can step up. And some people will never progress that far and that’s OK – they are all contributing. I think that’s needed in activism too. Some people need to spend time as a prospect – not going on Black Lives Matter marches, but wearing a safety pin. Some people need to settle at donor – they might give some of their time and money to a cause, by donating food to a food bank to combat poverty, for example, but they won’t push. And that’s also OK. I think there is a tendency in social justice movements to constantly shame people for not doing enough and that is actually super counterproductive. Yes, some people may be inspired by that and fight on to do more, but that isn’t a normal human response.


5)      Don’t argue to the death. Make a point and leave people to think about it. Changing someone’s mind is a slow process and normally occurs over a number of encounters. Another reason why internet dog piles are so useless – overwhelming conversation over a short period of time isn’t helpful. A drip drip approach is much more likely to work.


6)      Listen as well as talk. If you can’t find anything to agree with in what someone says, you’re probably not the right person to be talking to them. Leave them be and find someone else to engage. Unless you have common ground you are very unlikely to get anywhere.


7)      Use examples and case studies. Use personal stories. People respond much more to them than they do to numbers – it’s called ‘the identifiable victim effect’. But you need to make these stories relatable. One of the case studies we looked at was a woman suffering from very complex mental health problems. The case study barely mentioned them. It just talked about how the charity had helped her reconnect with her children. It didn’t ask us to look at her as a patient. It asked us to identify with her as a mother and I think that’s really important. It’s also why I think campaigns like the LGBT campaign for equal marriage rights has been so successful – ultimately, most people can identify with a narrative that says “I met someone I really love and wants to get married” and it’s very hard to argue against that without looking like a horrible person. It’s a really common (if not universal) story. It’s far harder if you start off by saying “these people are totally different to you, but you have to support them anyway”. People don’t emotionally engage with the alien and if they aren’t emotionally engaged, they are far less likely to act. I also don’t think it’s true – everyone has a human story. Focus on that.


8)      Bring the issue as close to home as possible. Remind people that you aren’t talking about aliens – an Oxfam campaign about women farmers took off massively after they found a young female farmer in the Hebrides to act as the face for their campaign in Scotland. She went to the Scottish parliament with Oxfam reps and brought in £8million of funding for women farmers worldwide. A young woman from Bangladesh would have been unlikely to have that impact. If you’re talking about racism to people in the UK, don’t just talk about police brutality in South Central LA. Talk about the Met police, for example. And, again, remember that no one will do anything to support the Other.


9)      Assess your audience and objective. And there’s nothing wrong with going for a quick win. The WWF know this. That’s why they put pictures of the panda everywhere. No one cares if a bug goes extinct. This is also my massive flaw in argument. I become enraged by simplification and try and explain, at length, complex and contradictory and messy nuance. But it’s far less persuasive. Sometimes you need to give a streamlined message.


10)   Put your audience in the story. Sometimes you can be broad with this – one campaign tagline was ‘calling all former children’. It sounds silly, but it works. Remind them ‘this could happen to you’. Humans care, but humans are ultimately selfish. You need to harness this to your advantage.


And this stuff works everywhere – if you’re talking about Black Lives Matter, or Jeremy Corbyn, or Scottish Independence. Because really, it’s about persuasion. And people’s brains work the same all over. Obviously, sometimes you might get into a fight that isn’t about persuading – it’s about stigmatising certain kinds of behaviour, certain lines of speech – and I get that. Sometimes it’s just that you’re hurt and angry and fed up and want to let people know. I get that too. But we need to be honest about what is genuinely effective and what isn’t. I don’t promise that any of this will work. But I can say this is the stuff that has science behind it. And I like science. 

Read a really interesting FB post by Ruth yesterday about thin privilege in LRP and it vaguely got me thinking.

( All very dull unless you're interested in people, Live Action Role Play, and how people respond to size )

This is a random pondering.

If you were given a button, and told that if you pressed it, someone you dislike would die, would you?

You'd be able to name the person and they would die. It wouldn't be your fault. It would be entirely untraceable. Maybe it would be a car crash, maybe a heart attack. But they would die. It could be someone you'd never met - a dictator - or someone who had hurt you in a specific way.

Consequences free killing.

Could you?

Would you?

I was listening to this song earlier. It's by Joshua Kaddison and is sort of the sequel to his awesome and unmatchable Jessie.

I'm undecided whether I like this song or not. I mean, as a song it obviously isn't nearly as good as 'Jessie', but my ambivalence is about more than that.

Part of what makes Jessie so amazing as a song, I think, is that it is ambiguous. It's about a guy talking about the girl he's not quite over, the girl he wants back, but knows the odds are against it, after all they've been through. And yet there's still that hope. The song ends on that hope - 'and who knows, maybe this time things will turn out just the way you planned'.

And we've all been there, right? God knows I have. I've had that moment of knowing that the odds are really freaking well not in my favour, but damnit, I want to believe. I've had the ex I'm not over, the hopes and dreams still lingering. And when I hear 'Jessie', I get that feeling again which says that logically there is no chance in hell that they will make it to Mexico, but you keep listening because there's still the hope.

Now, the follow up song in some ways makes me happy. It gives the listening a happy ending. It's the story of the singer of 'Jessie' lying in bed with Jessie. And yeah, they never made it to Mexico, but they did make it together. They beat those odds.

That's lovely, but I don't know that I think it's nearly as powerful as the ambiguity of the original, and I kinda feel that it almost detracts from it. A song about a crazy hope is far more potent than a song about a guy deciding to rebuild his relationship, especially once you know, as a listener, that things will work out in the end.

It's not about the moment, the hope, the leap into the dark.

It gives 'Jessie' a road map, and that isn't nearly as artistically effective.

What do you guys think?

Once, a long time ago, I did a favour for a friend. He was interested in a girl who had recently ended a relationship with a good friend of his, and he was trying to work out how much trouble he would get in if he asked her out. How soon was too soon? Her ex was pretty gutted. How big a betrayal of friendship was it? And would people think he had been shagging this lass all along?

So, I put up the entry. I can't remember what I wrote now. I think it was a hypothetical situation along those lines, and a ramble about what is the right or wrong thing to do. I may have even phrased it as 'I've been pondering the morality of this situation' before continuing on, mentioning no names.

The response I got was amazing. Four different people mailed me privately to say 'is that about me?', with varying levels of politeness, from "I was just worried" to "look, it's none of your business". In three of those cases I had had no idea that the people in question had that kind of drama in their lives. I mean, it was really fascinating to find out what was going on, and a little disconcerting.

I learned two things that day. One was that there is a risk in cryptic LJ posts. Everyone always assumes it is about them*. The other is that there is no subtle way to write about an actual drama that is going on in your or anyone else's life, even if you're only touching on it opaquely. Because everyone will know you are really talking about them.

As such, I just wrote a really long entry on the morality of gossip, ethics and discussing the love lives of your friends and set it to private, partly because it actually has been prompted by some recent events, and partly because I realized after writing it that it looked like it was prompted by others. It was a really good piece as well. I used a bunch of PCs as examples of dramatic and gossip inspiring situations. But it shall be kept hidden. I am, however, really tempted to post it up in six months time. I'm wondering what responses I might get, especially to the immortal query 'is it right to gossip if your friend has a sex tape uploaded to youtube?'


*well, in your case it actually is

I have two semi-connected rambles to post, which seem to have taken totally different directions and will probably make me look like a stinking hypocrite.

The international response to the London riots.

I find it darkly amusing that Iran and Pakistan are expressing concerns about human rights and the government’s need to listen and understand.

I'm also raising an eyebrow at the Daily Mail's insistence that it is actively irresponsible to, in any way, suggest that the riots may have anything to do with the cuts. Half of the Guardian's CiF seem to agree. I can't help but feel the urge to comment that whilst the kids in hoodies who are looting for Nike trainers probably aren't doing it as a part of a complex and well thought through political strategy, there were no mass riots in London prior to the cuts. And, in fact, the last lot of riots on this scale were, in fact, in London in 1981, when there was also a recession and a Tory government.

I also believe that if you tell poor people constantly that they are scum, that they don't deserve homes, or jobs, or any kind of safety net, and that things will not get better, then they might actually listen.

And yes, Daily Mail. I am talking to you.

Elsewhere, I have also stumbled across all the drama surrounding a US couple’s ’Hobo’ themed wedding.

For those who want a quick summary, a couple of people in the US were getting married, and decided to have a theme wedding (which, as a note, I have been totally a fan of, ever since I encountered the first ‘Harry Potter’ wedding where guests got wands instead of favours. Friends in committed relationships, please take note!) and as their theme took some kind of pseudo-1930s setting, whereby they and their guests apparently turned up to re-enact the Great Depression as portrayed in The Journey of Natty Gann. The groom wore dungarees, the guests feasted on 'moonshine', and had a giant big BBQ and there were cute vintage clothes all round.

Afterwards, flushed with contentment, they posted their wedding pictures on Etsy, only to find that not everyone found their wedding really as cute as they did. In fact, it featured in on a snark blog, and was thoroughly bitched about for having a wedding which took 'poor people' as its theme when the bride and groom weren't really poor, and, in fact, spent $15,000 on their wedding when there were people leaving comments on the blog who only earn $2.99 per year, and who's grandmother was a hobo who had to eat her own children to survive and they crawled over broken glass to leave those internet comments and don't they see how offensive it all is! (or something like that).

As you may be able to tell, my sympathy wasn't entirely with these outraged commentators. First of all, Weddings cost a lot of money. Like...a lot. This couple spent around £9k on their wedding, which, in all honesty, is pretty small for a proper big wedding. And I don't care if you got married for £50 wearing a dress you bought from Oxfam on the way there, shortly before eating a Gregg's pasty for your reception dinner. Congratulations! You had a small cheap wedding. I'm sure someone out there can tell you that they got married for £2.99, wearing a dress made out of broken glass and with a reception dinner made up of cyanide. And all of you (including those spendthrift hobos) will have paid less than Paul McCartney and Heather Mills who spent £3million on their nuptials, and then proceeded to get divorced in acrimony however many years later.

And, yeah, it was a slightly random choice, but it isn't like they weren't doing something that hasn't been done a million times before. We've been glamourizing miserable bits of history forever. History is not sacrosanct. History is full of nasty miserable bits (and by the way, all you people with your cute celtic weddings, you're aware that the people who made all those lovely knotwork designed also liked to sacrifice people?) and it's full of heartwarming, hopeful, beautiful bits which speak to people in some way or another.

I mean, was I the only child who used to bounce around her living room cheerily singing "Down Down Down" in sonourous tones along to Bugsy Malone? Did anyone else watch and re-watch Disney's plucky Depression era heroine, Natty Gann, snog John Cusack and quietly wish that they would get that bit over and done with so the film could go back to showing me more of her dog?

One fairly sensible website offered up this take on it. I think my sympathies went a little closer to the couple getting married. Indeed, I think the main lesson I took from this is that the internet is full of judgemental pricks. And, to be fair, no one looks good in dungarees.