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So as long as I stick to describing your behaviour as "dishonesty" or "stupidity", I am OK, and only open to criticism if I describe you as dishonest or stupid?
OK, I can deal with that.
Your complaint here appears to stem either from dishonesty (or, to be charitable, monstrous disingenuity) or stupidity. I would suggest stupidity as the lesser of the two evils to cop to. In an attempt to illustrate this, I will go way, way back to a previous time that you raised the volume of your puling about the mysterious PC demons.
Do you find irony in arguing for greater political sensitivity while often berating or criticizing Barbelith posters?
There was some discussion of what is meant by "irony"
3. fig. Discrepancy between the expected and the actual state of affairs; a contradictory or ill-timed outcome of events as if in mockery of the fitness of things (like rain on your wedding day. If you married a meteorologist. And he named the day).
I think this must be the one you're a-thinking of. Unless it's the use of a language with one meaning for a privileged audience and another for those addressed or concerned, which is actually pretty much how everything I say seems to come out, though often through spectacularly obscure references to David Bowie's Anthony Newley period.
So, presumably the expected state of events is that, since I want people to be more "politically sensitive" (the politically correct term for "politically correct", I assume), that I should also be nice to people on Barbelith. The discrepancy then being that I am in fact not nice to people on Barbelith.
Except..."politically sensitive" means something like my utopian vision above, don't it? Where people do not despise their brothers and sisters because of the colour of their skin or their choice of sexual partner? In which case, surely that means that I should be *more* abrasive, not less, because I have so much more ability to dislike people on their merits, *as people*, rather than wasting energy disliking billions of people I've never even met. Yay me.
Or, to look at it another way, thinking that people in general should not be plagued with people behaving like wankers and also thinking that specific people at specific times should not be plaguing Barbelith by behaving like wankers seem remarkably *congruent*, if anything....
So, Lawrence, in your rather charming way, you actually appear to have identified the single, solitary non-ironic element of my entire life. Nice one.
And, once again, you appear to have managed to identify something that is almost precisely not hypocrisy. Later, I look forward to the inevitable third card, the accusation of pedantry (which, to avoid the impossibly tempting one-liner that will otherwise result, only has one "e"). I have stated previosuly that I believe your thesis of intent as incomplete and ill-conceived, and have debated it until bored senseless by your intransigence. I see litle reason to revisit this.
Meanwhile. It strikes me that by describing Warren Ellis as the "fatbeard lust object" of people who have contacted him to dob Cameron Stewart in to Warren Ellis, I have identified a certain set of behaviours (immaturity, seeking the attention of one's comic idol, schoolyard behaviour) in a specific instance, in a certain group of people only united through the action of contacting Warren Ellis to tell tales on cameron Stewart, as identifiable as partaking of the concept of fatbeard lust for Warren Ellis. The intent of that construction is indeed pejorative. I believe that it is contemptible behaviour. If you believe that this is the same as calling somebody with pejorative intent a nigger because they are black, or a faggot because they are gay, then I'm afraid your traditional insistence on the strident restatement of your own point is just going to make you sound progressively more ludicrous and offensive. To describe equating the focalised view of Warren Ellis to these people as a "fatbeard lust object" as comparable to using pejoratives intended to mark out people of a different race or sexual preference is behaviour that I can only describe as characteristic of a teenager. Later, no doubt, we will discover that insisting that the living room be tidied before bed is just like Hitler.
The issue is further unclouded, of course, by my being a reader of comics, and comics created by Warren Ellis, myself. So, my intent cannot possibly be to tar all those who read comics or comics by Warren Ellis with the brush of my hatred.
And yet further unclouded by the status of these people. They are not a "less fashionable belittled group". They are a group of individuals who appear to be justifying the worst possible readings of comic book readers, as adolescent, childish and fixated on seeking the approval of their idols. As such, to reprimand them as exemplifying precisely the unkind stereotypes imposed from outside on my comic-reading community cannot function in the same way that a cry of "nigger" at a black person might, unless by that, arguably, we are saying that a black person was upbraiding another black person for behaving in a manner befitting the caricatures imposed by others using the term as a racially discriminatory pejorative - the Chris Rock argument, at which point we move into a different arena.
I already know you have no interest in listening to any dissenting viewpoint, Loz, and that you will now continue to repeat the same statement over and over again, possibly in slightly different words, in the hope of eventually grinding down or iritating me into an unwise comment, because that is how it has ever been. So, I intend to preempt you. You may not be able to see it, but I am screaming and screaming until I am sick. I'm having a hard barbeweek, and your grade-school Republicanism is not helping. |
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