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OK. I'll start with Claris Dancers, also known as Qwik. Quick has not posted here for long, but has managed an orgy of boat-burning. Key texts here are the Feminism 101 thread and the Ron Paul thread - links following where contextual.
So, we start at the Feminism 101 thread. At present, we must remember that ignorance is not something which we currently take to be a banning offence on Barbelith. So, the usual tired, unlearned never-read-Dworkin citations of Dworkin were not in themselves actionable. However, his reaction to being corrected and informed was surprsingly hostile. To quote gourami:
Qwik, you're not actually making sense, you know. The smileys give the vague impression that you're satisfied with yourself, and I'm completely baffled as to why.
This delight at really very limited achievements is a feature of the troll, of course, but also of the child, and like a child Qwik was keen to share his view of the world even if he did not have the necessary facts. If he wanted to talk about Transformers, this would not be a huge issue. As it is, however, he did in fact want to talk about rape:
I'm not a lawyer, but I can't imagine that a woman raped by her husband would have no defense. I would imagine that it would be similar to date rape, though probably less easy to prove. And yes it has to be proven, it can't be one word against another. There have been too many women seeking power over men claiming they were raped when they were not. They "believe they need an unfair advantage" as Dworkin would say. Rape is horrible and shouldn't exist, but some women do capitalize on the emotional impact of it for their own gain. Anyway, there has to be a legal defense for raped women in marriage.
When people who actually knew whereof they spoke provided him with actual information, Claris Dancers of course thanked them for giving him information he did not previously have, and undertook to be more careful when making such potentially very upsetting statements.
No, obviously not. He disappeared as a preferable alternative to admitting a lack of omniscience.
To be honest, I assumed that that would be the last we'd see of him. However, as a dog to its vomit.... Claris Dancers pops up with a thread about the (arguably) libertarian Presidential candidate Ron Paul, here. When Paul's atiitudes to various things are questioned, it is worth noting that Claris Dancers goes first in the thread for the personal insult - what he later incorrectly calls an ad hominem - to Flyboy:
I wish I could be as cool as you.
Flyboy reacts in an exemplary fashion:
That's flattering, but not really on-topic: perhaps there's a thread in Conversation might be appropriate?
However, we were already seeing some problems around race - specifically, whether Ron Paul was in fact a successor to Martin Luther King, which discussion led to this showstopper:
Flyboy: However that context exists, and to deny it, and then aim accusations of racism at people who have the temerity to make issues of race visible by highlighting and working to oppose otherwise invisible inequality, is about as far from the spirit of Dr King as you can get.
I find this to be disingenuous. I also think that most of this context exists because it is self-imposed if only out of "racial pride." I've heard more times than I care to remember that black people refuse to take certain jobs because they don't want to "whiten-up." That means (according to them), not talking in ebonics, dressing appropriately for the job (suit/tie/blouse/skirt/etc...) and so on. This is more of a cultural issue than anything else, though. I've actually see white people in the ghetto, laughing at other white people for acting too "white," whatever the hell that means. The stupidity and ignorance abounds. The only place I can think of where people are genuinely discriminated against are with cops. There's even a term for it - "driving while black." But that context gets fuzzy again since the same holds true for people with grateful dead and phish stickers on their cars.
In no place I have worked in has there been a disproportionate number of white people to anyone else of color. Where I work now (state office job), white people are actually a minority. Sudanese, Pakistani, Hispanic, Indian, Black, Asian, and on and on. It's really cool actually, we have an international food day every year where people bring in dishes from their own cultures. But that is off the point. The point is that as far as I've seen, any actual racism is either entirely self-imposed (as Ron Paul implies), or incredibly overblown by the media.
Italics in the quoted section mine. Full text here.
Frankly, this was never going to go well. You already sort of know that there will never be any documentary support for these contentions. However. At this point Flyboy raised his comments about rape in "Feminism 101" and Claris Dancers replied:
Boy that was a steamroller of a thread. I don't think i would say it's the same, but I still support everything i said there, though not the things other people put in my mouth, which seems to happen a lot in this place.
Just to recap and be clear. Nobody put into his mouth the statement:
There have been too many women seeking power over men claiming they were raped when they were not. They "believe they need an unfair advantage" as Dworkin would say. Rape is horrible and shouldn't exist, but some women do capitalize on the emotional impact of it for their own gain.
Nor, for that matter, the statement that Andrea Dworkin was "thankfully" deceased, but let's stay on one thing.
Essentialy, I don't see Claris Dancers adding anything but heartache to Barbelith. He has never and to the best of my knowledge will never say anything of any real interest. While he hangs around, adding no value, we all, and specifically women on Barbelith who have survived sexual assault, have to deal with this crap - specifically, this crap where he downplays the significance of sexual assault, and tells us that women make up accusations of rape to gain power over men all the time. I don't want to see that, and I don't want anyone here to have to deal with it.
It may be early to start talking about banning, but I am driven in raising the issue by a few things:
a) I've seen people being "grandfathered" around here before - people end up very hard to ban simply because they have not been banned previously. I don't want to see this happening, and I want to make it clear that I see this behaviour as problematic to the point of being banworthy right now.
b) It is clear from Claris Dancer's tergiversations and dissembling that he hasn't really thought about any of these things - the blacks, the whites who are not proud to be white, the women who cry wolf - and is profoundly resistant to being induced to think about them. His responses are a mishmash of prejudice, recent tabloid headlines and received right-wing wisdom. I've seen this enough times to know that the chances of generating any imnprovement are already minimal.
c) Honestly, I don't see why we should put women and survivors of sexual assault on Barbelith, or indeed black people, or indeed white people, through this welter of offensive generalisation and defensive insult. He is clearly very happy with his prejudices, to the point where any attempt to correct them - even factually, as in the case of marital rape - will be ignored or responded to with hostility. I see no likelihood of improvement, or profit in having the experience of being black, being insufficiently proud to be white and being sexually assaulted denigrated in this fashion. Quite simply, it is not our job to put up with being thrown up and shat on while trying, and probably failing, to toilet-train. That's a job for a mother. Barbelith is not a mother. |
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