it's gonna be alright

What is your Hogwarts house?

given that jk rowling has spent the last few years asserting, with increasingly vicious derangement, that people like me are either dangerous sexual predators or confused self-victimising naifs who in either case don't deserve equal human rights or protection under the law, and who has further stated her belief that supporting her work constitutes endorsement of her anti-trans stance, my hogwarts house is Fuck No

I suddenly thought of an interesting question. What is the purpose of democracy? Is it democracy for democracy's sake? democracy exists to protect human rights. Voting is one of the most typical expressions of democracy, but if, due to the tyranny of the majority—the so-called ‘will of the people’—the human rights of the country’s citizens are actually severely harmed (as in the case of this U.S. election), what then? Does democracy, at this stage, still have any meaning to uphold?I mean, suppose, at this moment, one party were to take power through undemocratic means, such as election manipulation, a coup, or assassination, but this party’s policies were, comparatively, more protective of human rights than the opposing party’s. From an objective standpoint of justice, should it be supported at this stage?🤔

I think this is indeed an interesting question and I'll try to answer it in two parts.

First, the idea that "democracy exists to protect human rights" is a considerably recent idea, and doesn't actually figure much into classical expressions/conceptions of democracy. As it was originally practiced in Athens, it had nothing to do with safeguarding the rights of marginalized groups (indeed, if anything, the opposite). It was just a system where groups of people, i.e. property-owning citizen men, were allowed to make decisions collectively, but it was still able to be adjourned at any time for a despot (in the classical sense) to resume autocratic authority. It just means a system in which the people (demos) have authority (kratia). That means, therefore, who constitutes as a "person" under the law is one of the longest-running questions (and struggles) in the entire history of the concept.

As it was then thought about in the Enlightenment and the 18th-century context in which the founding fathers wrote the US Constitution, "democracy" was very much the same idea of a small group of "worthy" but ordinary men making decisions in a quasi-elected framework, rather than as a single inherited monarchy. There was still no particular idea that "human rights" was a goal, and would have been foreign to most political theorists. There was an emerging idea of "natural rights" wherein man (and definitely man) was a specially rational creature who had a right to have a say in his government, but yet again, that depended on who was viewed as qualified to have that say. (The answer being, again, white property-owning Christian men.) There have been many constitutional law papers written on how much the founding fathers trusted the American electorate (not very) and how the American government was deliberately designed to work inefficiently in order to slow down the implementation of possibly-stupid decisions (but therefore also potentially-helpful ones). The Electoral College, aside from being an attempt to finesse the slavery question (did slaves count as people for purposes of allotting House representatives? James Madison famously decided they counted as three-fifths of a person), was a further system of indirect republicanism. Likewise, US Senators were not popularly elected on a secret ballot, the same as the president, until the passage of the 17th Amendment in 1913.

Of course at the same time in the 19th-early 20th century, the Civil War, Reconstruction and its end, Jim Crow, women's suffrage movements, were all ongoing, and represented further challenge and revision of what "democracy" meant in the American context, and who counted as a legally recognized person who was thus entitled to have their say in government. It was not until Black people and women began insisting that they did in fact count as people that there was any universal idea of "human rights" as expressed in popular democratic systems. This further developed in the 20th century in the world war context, and then in the decolonization waves in the 1950s and 1960s that dismantled European imperialism and gave rise to a flood of new nation-states. Etc. etc., the Civil Rights movement in America, the gay rights movement starting with Stonewall, and further expansion of who was seen as a person not just in the physical but the legal and actionable sense.

That's why we have political philosophy concepts of "electoral" and "liberal" democracies, and why they're not quite the same. In an electoral democracy, people have the right to vote on and elect their leaders, but there may be less protection of associated "liberal" rights such as freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of expression and assembly, and other characteristics that we think of in terms of protected groups and individual rights. Liberal democracies make a further commitment to protect those rights in addition to the basic principle of voting on your leaders, but as noted, democracy does not inherently protect them and if you have a system where a simple majority vote of 49% can remove rights from the other 48%, you have a problem. Technically, it's still democracy -- the people have voted on it, and one side voted more than the other -- but it's not compatible with justice, which is a secondary question and a whole other debate.

In the modern world, autocrats have often been popularly elected, which is technically a democratic process, but the problem is that once they get there, they start dismantling all the civic processes and safeguards that make the country a democracy, and make it much harder for the opposition to win an election and for power to meaningfully change hands. See for example India (Narendra Modi/BJP), Turkey (Recep Tayyip Erdoğan/AKP), Poland (Jarosław Kaczyński/PiS), Hungary (Viktor Orbán/Fidesz), Russia (Vladimir Putin/United Russia) and America (Donald Trump/GOP). Some of these countries were more democratic than others to start with, but all of them have engaged in either significant democratic erosion or full authoritarian reversion. The US is not -- yet -- at the latter stage, as I have written about the features of the system that make it different from other countries on that list, but it's in the danger zone.

Lastly, the idea of "we're morally better and protect human rights but are willing to launch a coup/assassination/etc of the current government" has been claimed many, many times throughout history. It has never been the case. Not least since if a party in a democratic system, however flawed, is willing to throw aside the core feature of that system, they simply don't respect human rights in any meaningful sense. That's why we kept having "the people's revolutions," especially in the 20th century, that promised to uphold and liberate the working class and all ended up as repressive communist dictatorships functionally indistinguishable from the autocracies or even quasi-democracies they had replaced. In this day and age, does anyone want Online Leftists, who will cancel and viciously attack fellow leftists for tiny disagreements on the internet, deciding that they're going to overthrow the government and announce themselves the great protector of human rights? Aside from the fact that they couldn't do it even if they ever tried and stopped being insane keyboard warriors, I don't think anyone would believe them, and nor should they, because violent antidemocratic groups are bad. This is the sixth-grade level explanation, but it's true.

If you're so drastically committed to your ideology that you're willing to destroy everyone else for not agreeing (and even then, post-revolution, the revolutionaries always start eating each other), then you're not special or enlightened. You're the exact same kind of ideological zealot who has been responsible for most of the worst atrocities throughout history. When "I need to kill for my beliefs but I'll clearly only kill the right people" is your guiding philosophy, the "right people to be killed" quickly expand past any controls or laws. Why not, especially when you've just declared the law to be invalid? Pretty soon you're into death-squads and extrajudicial-assassinations territory, and no matter how soaringly noble your aims were to start with, you've become much worse than what you replaced.

This does not mean "we all have an obligation to obey oppressive governments because the alternative is worse," which has been likewise used by the oppressive governments who benefit from it. It just means that if a democracy is violently overthrown, what emerges from it -- no matter how nice their rhetoric might initially sound -- will invariably be much worse. Winston Churchill famously remarked that democracy is the worst form of government except for all the alternatives, and in this, I tend to agree with him. It sucks, but there's nothing that has yet been invented that can take its place or that has any interest in protecting human rights in the way that 21st-century liberal democracy has generally accepted it has an obligation to do, however partial, flawed, and regressive it can often be. Indeed right now, in this particular historical moment, the only feasible alternative is quite clearly far-right populist fascist theocratic authoritarianism, and that -- for you fortunate Americans who have never lived under anything like that -- is much, much worse. So yeah.

please help me- i used to be pretty smart but i’m having so much trouble grasping the concept of diegetic vs non-diegetic bdsm!

gfkjldghfd okay first of all I'm sorry for the confusion, if you're not finding anything on the phrase it's because I made it up and absolutely nobody but me ever uses it, but I haven't found a better way to express what I'm trying to say so I keep using it. but now you've given me an excuse to ramble on about some shit that is only relevant to me and my deeply inefficient way of talking and by god I'm going to take it.

SO. the way diegetic and non-diegetic are normally used is to talk about music and sound design in movies/tv shows. in case you aren't familiar with that concept, here's a rundown:

diegetic sound is sound that happens within the world of the movie/show and can be acknowledged by the characters, like a song playing on the stereo during a driving scene, or sung on stage in Phantom of the Opera. it's also most other sounds that happen in a movie, like the sounds of traffic in a city scene, or a thunderclap, or a marching band passing by. or one of the three stock horse sounds they use in every movie with a horse in it even though horses don't really vocalize much in real life, but that's beside the point, the horse is supposed to be actually making that noise within the movie's world and the characters can hear it whinnying.

non-diegetic sound is any sound that doesn't exist in the world of the movie/show and can't be perceived by the characters. this includes things like laugh tracks and most soundtrack music. when Duel of Fates plays in Star Wars during the lightsaber fight for dramatic effect, that's non-diegetic. it exists to the audience, but the characters don't know their fight is being backed by sick ass music and, sadly, can't hear it.

the lines can get blurry between the two, you've probably seen the film trope where the clearly non-diegetic music in the title sequence fades out to the same music, now diegetic and playing from the character's car stereo. and then there are things like Phantom of the Opera as mentioned above, where the soundtrack is also part of the plot, but Phantom of the Opera does also have segments of non-diegetic music: the Phantom probably does not have an entire orchestra and some guy with an electric guitar hiding down in his sewer just waiting for someone to break into song, but both of those show up in the songs they sing down there.

now, on to how I apply this to bdsm in fiction.

if I'm referring to diegetic bdsm what I mean is that the bdsm is acknowledged for what it is in-world. the characters themselves are roleplaying whatever scenarios their scenes involve and are operating with knowledge of real life rules/safety practices. if there's cnc depicted, it will be apparent at some point, usually right away, that both characters actually are fully consenting and it's all just a planned scene, and you'll often see on-screen negotiation and aftercare, and elements of the story may involve the kink community wherever the characters are. Love and Leashes is a great example of this, 50 Shades and Bonding are terrible examples of this, but they all feature characters that know they're doing bdsm and are intentional about it.

if I'm talking about non-diegetic bdsm, I'm referring to a story that portrays certain kinks without the direct acknowledgement that the characters are doing bdsm. this would be something like Captive Prince, or Phantom of the Opera again, or the vast majority of bodice ripper type stories where an innocent woman is kidnapped by a pirate king or something and totally doesn't want to be ravished but then it turns out he's so cool and sexy and good at ravishing that she decides she's into it and becomes his pirate consort or whatever it is that happens at the end of those books. the characters don't know they're playing out a cnc or D/s fantasy, and in-universe it's often straight up noncon or dubcon rather than cnc at all. the thing about entirely non-diegetic bdsm is that it's almost always Problematic™ in some way if you're not willing to meet the story where it's at, but as long as you're not judging it by the standards of diegetic bdsm, it's just providing the reader the same thing that a partner in a scene would: the illusion of whatever risk or taboo floats your boat, sometimes to extremes that can't be replicated in real life due to safety, practicality, physics, the law, vampires not being real, etc. it's consensual by default because it's already pretend; the characters are vehicles for the story and not actually people who can be hurt, and the reader chose to pick up the book and is aware that nothing in it is real, so it's all good.

this difference is where people tend to get hung up in the discourse, from what I've observed. which is why I started using this phrasing, because I think it's very crucial to be able to differentiate which one you're talking about if you try to have a conversation with someone about the portrayal of bdsm in media. it would also, frankly, be useful for tagging, because sometimes when you're in the mood for non-diegetic bodice ripper shit you'd call the police over in real life, it can get really annoying to read paragraphs of negotiation and check-ins that break the illusion of the scene and so on, and the opposite can be jarring too.

it's very possible to blur these together the same way Phantom of the Opera blurs its diegetic and non-diegetic music as well. this leaves you even more open to being misunderstood by people reading in bad faith, but it can also be really fun to play with. @not-poignant writes fantastic fanfic, novels, and original serials on ao3 that pull this off really well, if you're okay with some dark shit in your fiction I would highly recommend their work. some of it does get really fucking dark in places though, just like. be advised. read the tags and all that.

but yeah, spontaneous writer plug aside, that's what I mean.