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You've provided quite a good example of why it is difficult to maintain the illusion to oneself that talking with you about these things is very profitable, John, but I hope you get something out of this. If not, then I suppose other people might, at least.
I would like to engage you on this for a bit, if you'll be so kind.
First up, of course, this is simply not true. Engagement would involve reading what I had written and asking for clarification of the parts you did not understand (for reference, all of it). However, you have seen other people say this, and it seems to confer an air of gravitas, so off you go.
Whehey, I was waiting for you to bring this up, but seeing how its not fucking relevant at all
Since you have pretty clearly not understood a word of what I have said so far, it is hardly appropriate for you to claim that something is not relevant to it. However, once again, you have seen people do this before in arguments.
So, let me explain why it is relevant - and at the very least, John, please read this twice and ask me or another friend for help with any parts you find difficult.
When you started explaining why it was OK to call women slags, as long as they were slags, and were challenged, your response was that the problem was not your behaviour, but how sensitive Barbelith was compared to "real life":
I forgot people here are more sensitive than in real life.
And you stayed with that through the first wave of apologies:
I do accept, totally, that my use of that word on this forum was wrong.
I have apologised sincerely about using that word in this space
It's not quite "I'm sorry... SORRY YOU'RE OVERSENSITIVE", but it's not far off. That's why I felt so happy when you said that you had actually started questioning the way you and your associates called women slags in your everyday life, because it suggested that you were actually able, admittedly after the expenditure of a huge amount of energy, to get the hang of the idea that other people may react to things with less equanimity than you not because they are in some way weird or wrong or "sensitive", but because they have a different position with merits of its own which might be worth looking at and evaluating for what it can tell you about the entrenched assumptions of your own position.
As such, as you would have seen had you either understood what I have written or asked for clarification, it is entirely relevant.
A little garbled there, H
Really? Please, show me where. It is a grammatically correct and logically coherent statement. If you find it hard to understand, you have the option of asking me to explain it in simpler terms, although as we will see you are not actually reading anything very much that I write, so that seems unlikely. Again, you have seen other people offer this gambit, so you are imitating it. However, this may not be a good idea, since... well, for Heaven's sake, I can't even be bothered to explain this. It may be an attempt to goad me into correcting your actual errors and garblings, thus making you look like a victim, but that suggests a degree of guile with which I wouldn't want to discredit you. It is simply an insult, and a weirdly inappropriate one - like calling me shortarse or fatty. I sometimes wear glasses, if that helps you to dig up something more fitting.
How can you not accept that some people, such as myself, are not really offended by this?
Now, this is where we finally get to the meat of it, and where it turns out that you have not actually understood a word I have said. I don't know what you do in your job, John, but I imagine that sometimes you have to try to explain to a co-worker how to do something, or why you did something, or why something is not working. Have you ever has the experience where, after you have done so, the other person has responded in a way that demonstrates they were not really listening and did not understand a word you said, but also that they believe that they were and that they did? Did this result in you having to go over it all over again? Did they then respond in exactly the same way? This is what talking to you here is like.
So, find a single instance where I failed to accept that some people, such as myself, are not really offended by this. Go on. Please. There is no such instance. You are not telling lies out of malice, but you are telling lies, to me, to Barbelith and to yourself, about what has happened here. If you do not think that that is correct, prove it. Find one statement where I do not accept that some people, such as [yourself], are not really offended by this.
You can't, because you have made that up, in your head.
You seem to be offended by the very fact that I'm not bothered by this (and I only posted in the first place to express my liking for the Davro bit), it seems to piss you, and a few other people off.
Nope. I'm not even surprised, much less offended. Disappointed, perhaps, but not by you not being bothered, but by the way you denied that anyone else had the right to be in any way bothered. I will explain below what I actually said, and I hope that you will listen this time.
But it's really daft - you are within your rights to be outraged by whatever you like, just as I'm allowed to not be bothered by the same things.
This is perfectly true, and has nothing to do with what I have actually said, which you have either not read or not understood.
So really, I'm at a loss here. You've totally backed me into a corner, and I don't know what I can do to get out. I'm going to stop replying to this thread for a while, I'll still post around the board as and when the feeling takes me. If you and flyboy and whoever else want to jump on my every point, feel free. It makes for fun reading.
As has been said repeatedly, children in the playground believe that they win if they do not show emotion, or talk about how funny the argument is, while the other person does. See Crimes of Fashion, or Hawksmoor, for exactly this gambit. As we grow up, we start to realise that it is OK to take things seriously, and to take seriously things that matter to other people. You have clearly not reached this stage.
Which is, actually, what I was writing about and what you have totally failed to read or understand. At no point was I offended by the very fact that I'm not bothered by this. Since I now know that you did not understand what I was saying, I will try again. I will be as obvious and as simple as I can, and I expect you to try your best to understand it.
As I explained above, when you were pulled up for your views on slags (and this is where the relevance is explained - I honestly did not expect to have to make this clear, but I have massively overestimated the level of complexity acceptable from the start, for which I apologise) your immediate response was framed in terms of people on Barbelith being more sensitive than people in "real life" - that is, that there was something abnormal about not wanting women to be dismissed as slags. It felt like a breakthrough when you stated that you had actually been induced to consider that maybe the way you and your chums described women as slags might not actually be exactly the right way, and obviously the right way, and therefore that anyone who did not behave in the same way did so because of some personal eccentricity.
However. In the 300 thread we find you - and the funny thing is that there was no need for this, except to shore up your sense of yourself as the arbiter of the appropriate level of thought to put into something, perhaps out of a sort of insecurity - making it clear not only that you have put in the appropriate amount of thought about the film, but that anyone who decideds to act differently is just being perverse by looking for things to be offended by:
I think there are certainly conspiracy theories here for those that want to look for them and be outraged by the film, but sometimes it's fun just to appreciate a work for it's purely aesthetic and sensory qualities and just not look for the dodgy politics to spoil your enjoyment of the work's many surface charms.
It's a bit garbled, but the meaning is clear. If you look at this film as anything other than what John, the Exploding Boy decided it was, you are indulging in "conspiracy theories". You are looking for something to be outraged by. "Outrage", incidentally, is a word you are overusing to portray people other than you. You may note that you contrast me being "outraged", although you then claim subsequently that I might not in fact be outraged at all but just playing devil's advocate like you do so well, with you being "not bothered". As I say, there are few things more appropriate to the playground at lunchtime than claiming that another child is crying. Older people can accept the validity of their own emotions and those of others without agressively exaggerating those of others or disclaiming their own.
Anyway. We then arrive here:
Meh! Leave it to Barbelith to find 'offence' in this song, eh?
At that point I thought that you might actually have been parodying yourself, but it appears not. You even put "offence" in inverted commas, to show how stupid and wrong it was to subject this to any interrogation not thought appropriate by yourself. We're back to:
I forgot people here are more sensitive than in real life.
This is where the Normal Bloke stuff comes in. Despite the terrible examples of actual classism and intellectual snobbery in the "normal blokes" thread in Conversation, Flyboy's intention in starting it was pretty clearly to reference behaviour recently displayed by you and Sole Eater, most notably, where the assumption has been made not only that your response is the correct response to a stimulus, but that it is the only response with any worth, and that any other approach is perverse and motivated not by a desire to respond appropriately (because, after all, such a desire would lead ineluctably to agreement with the common sense that you have expounded) but by a desire to find something to be outraged about. This is not just reactionary, it is also quite pointless. If you have no interest in other people's beliefs except how they can be pathologised to bolster your own sense of yourself as the fount of the only correct reaction to a stimulus, there is no point in talking with people who do not share those beliefs.
So, it seemed a positive sign when you appeared to have accepted the possibility that people who did not agree with you that some women are slags were not disagreeing because they were the sort of absurd cartoon Dworkinite who in doing so also makes the accusations that force you to respond:
*bangs head on desk* yes, I hate all women. Are you a woman? I hate you. I hate my mum, who raised me, fed me, taught me right from wrong. I hate my partner. I hate my colleagues. I hate half the world. Mr Misogynistic in the flesh.
(Funnily enough, Sole Eater has just responded to questions about his framing of a comparison of Indian and Chinese boat crews by denying that he believed his ex-wife was racially inferior to him - again, reacting to a hyperbolic misrepresentation of a stimulus rather than the stimulus itself, just as you did there.)
However, you have in short order done exactly the same trick with people who might want to talk about the politics of 300 and the disability politics in this thread - people who want to talk about something you personally do not want to talk about are just looking for conspiracy theories, or looking for things to be offended by when no such things exist. This is disrespectful to the beliefs of others, it is a brake on people actually being able to talk about things without you slagging them off for, in effect, not being you, and most of all (and again, this is where Slagmageddon is relevant) it suggests that you are actually moving backwards in terms of your ability to interact with and respect the views of other people on Barbelith, which is not something I would like to see.
So, there we are. I hope that this is easier for you to understand. Failing that, I hope that other readers get something out of it that justifies the time and effort I put into it. |
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