One of the things I hate more than some of the other things in The Great Community Wars is the cry of “get a JOB!!”
Like the cry quoted by Aja Romano in a Daily Dot piece on the latest front in The Great Community Wars, mockingly dubbed #tablegate.
Skeptics seized upon the discrepancies in Watson’s post and launched a heated backlash. One of the most outspoken critics of the incident was the ironically named Uberfeminist, a skeptics/atheists blog heavily focused on critiquing “American atheist social justice bloggers.” Uberfeminist believed Watson and Roth were trying to game Dragon Con by getting free attendance and then using their own panels to plug their table and merchandise:
Skepchick may say they’re not trying to make a profit, they’re trying to “break even” when accounting for the cost of making the trip happen. … Presumably the majority of attendees make this work by having a day job and saving money.
That’s far from the first time I’ve seen that stupid trope. It’s almost as popular as “real activists do real things, unlike those losers who write blog posts.” The two are closely related, of course, and about as vulgar and anti-intellectual as it’s possible to get. Yeah, get a job, John Keats – don’t lounge around writing poetry, do some honest work for a change.
Fuck that. People are allowed to try to make it work in other ways. People are allowed to put together a patchwork of partial jobs, to make a living by creating art, to make less money doing what they love instead of more money doing what they hate. People are allowed to do things that have little or no market value but a lot of non-market value. Just having a job isn’t the hallmark of virtue and merit.