the bet

the moment of my victory approaches.

Actually, the period of the bet is now over and tongodeon and i are hashing out the final poll as none of the extreme victory conditions (furry concentration camps versus popstars in furry outfits on stage during the superbowl) have taken place. Expect more news soon.

The Bet, redux.

The bet is now complete. vote

In many ways, to me this isn't about furries per se. It's about forecasting trends of acceptance in society and acculturation to the 'other.' When the bet was made, I had seen a couple of examples of furries appearing recently in pop culture and had been thinking about that. In may ways, I win no matter what happens because one of the results of the bet have been people mailing tongodeon disturbing furry pictures to the extent that we both had to ask folks to stop. Furries are sort of the sin-qua-non of cultural signifiers in our culture, safe to discriminate against because they both re-cross the uncanny valley and cover up all human attributes.

For me, it's interesting to watch how people react to subcultures like this in the generic sense. I'm not particularly interested in furries, I can understand the furry fetish in the generic sense that people can sexually fetishize whatever, but not the whole lifestyle/my soul is a dragon thing. It's more that furries are essentially a bell jar in which we can see versions of more extreme behavior such as people's treatment of the gay subculture, for example. In this little jar of nutty behavior, we can see all the behavior that make up the scope of human reactions against 'the other' expressed in a generally less harmful way in our modern context.

Dan Savage said that Gays needed to (and would) outlast the No on 8 people. There's a general idea that all you need to do to go from being a liberal into a conservative is not change your views for 20 years, and the descent of morals in youth has been a common theme since ancient Athens. Does this mean that I think there's some greater moral point to this bet? No. It's just been interesting to examine this all under a microscope for the last few years and thank you all for helping focus the lens.

Thanks to folks who have played along with the bet. In conclusion, rock on lobster girls.