This is just your failure to detatch your own personal frame from the interpretation. I actually say fuck a fair amount of the time in person, so it doesn’t have any of the Im-being-naughty nuance that you apparently attach to it. Which suggests that it is you who are the 13-year-old, but of the snitch variety rather than the smoking-in-the-bathroom type.
And *please* don’t start with the tough guy talk; unless this is your first post ever, you know that this can lead no useful end. That is to say, it’s very easy for you to insult my toughness when you know that your bluff cannot be called- it’s cowardly of you, in fact.

Here’s where your reading comprehension fails you: I never said I was (nor have I been throughout my visit here) offended, nor have I presumed any authority, moral or otherwise. It sounds as though you want that to be the case, but you lose on that score Kamron.

Pardon me for drawing the incredibly obvious conclusion from your sad little rant. Please confine yourself to posting about things that you actually give a fuck about, I suspect that will allow you to avoid dealing with this sort of problem in the future.
The fact that you’re keeping score IMO says it all- you’re not here to talk, you’re here because your self-worth meter is low & you think you can get a refill here. Using tactics such as this one, where you microparse meanings and then do a sad little victory dance.
[Why am I here? I like beating on assheads such as yourself when work is slow. For serious discussion of *anything*, Id be elsewhere.]

Oh – I take it back it *does* in fact sound a bit like the stench of moral authority … oh, wait, … those are your words. You do realize you’ve condemned most of your fellow travelers here with that statement, yes?

I am perfectly comfortable with taking a moral position on sexual assault. I am also perfectly confortable offering ridicule to those who want to act as moral policemen towards others’ language. Again, if you can’t see a difference between these two sorts of behavior, you are a moral idiot.
Also note that I didn’t suggest that both behaviors were unacceptable, just that attempting to draw a strong distinction between the two is morally bizarre. One might just as easily use my statement to support the idea that *all* jokes/flamewars are harmless (unless they become real-world actions, such as outing anonymous writers or posting private information). Which, as it turns out, is my actual position.
The fundamental point is that the sexual assault of an innocent adult is not substantially morally different than the sexual assault of a minor. Acting otherwise, for the furtherance of such a shitty little partisan point, is moral idiocy. It is taking something important (rape) and redefining it for trivial purposes (making political point in a blog comment).

I’m sorry, but your point, however much heat it generates, doesn’t hold up to the light very well. You want to conflate High School locker-room humor with serious, serial threatening language.

And you want to keep playing games, giving one kind of behavior one label and the other a completely different one, despite their basic similarity.
Only a delusional jackass like yourself could continue to maintain that the JonBenet comment was actually a threat. Even Jeff G says that it wasn’t a threat (please, fucking deal with that fact if you want to continue to claim that it was a serious threat). Everything the woman said indicates that it was not a threat- yet you want to classify it differently than cock-beating threats, and solely for rhetorical purposes.
In doing so, your trivialize genuine assaults and threats of assault. You cry wolf, and only because you have such low self-worth that you need to try to feel superior to others by making a point in a comment.

And that is (have a friend help you out here) Exactly. What. Your. Opponents. Have. Been. Accusing. You. Of.*

No one has accused *me* of anything, you pompous twit. Since my position is that all of this is a tempest in a teapot, that none of the statements were genuine threats, but that both JG’s and Fritch’s statements were in very poor taste, I fail to see how my position is threatened. Or even ‘accused’ of anything.
I shall offer you a tiny, tiny bit of help here: not all lefties think the same things.
That nugget of information will doubtless help you understand the world a bit better; in the future, you won’t make the mistake of believing that one of us speaks for the rest.
Of course, since that’s blindingly fucking obvious, the admonition wouldn’t be complete without the addition of ‘you fucking idiot’.

Ah yes, you have me there; I am indeed a bowtied, thesaurus-toting wanna-be Englishman.

What other kind of asshole would apologize for ending a sentence with a preposition? That’s exactly the sort of grammarian-authoritarian rule that your kind enjoys blabbing on about- it’s not even considered a fault except by the most anally-retentive:
http://www.bartleby.com/64/C001/050.html
It’s just a petty way of trying to feel superior to others, practiced solely by those who are overwhelmed by their own feelings of inferiority & deperately seek anything upon which to stake their self-worth.

Bite your tongue, jade! The “why don’t you move to Cuba” line is comedy gold!

Really? That’s so sad!

Business concluded, I am back. The thread looks to have gotten stale since last night, but I did promise to come back and engage, so here I am.

In order then –

Xavier:
“for fuck’s sake: i can sit here typing and mean any child in the world harm
and it is nothing without “means and opportunity�

Xavier, you’re awfully brave with someone else’s child. The woman is now (thankfully) unemployed by her University. Plenty of opportunity for someone who has done little else with her life in the last week than sit and brood on how the other side has ruined her life, and now has plenty of time on her hands to … what? take a macramé class? Self-reflect? Plan revenge on some guy in Colorado by abducting his kid? I don’t know and neither do you. But reread what she actually wrote. From reading her blog, it seems evident she doesn’t let things go. Ever.

And it doesn’t take much means to harm a 2 year old. Any functioning adult can do it. Even halfwit liberal professors blinded by outrage.

And if you want to argue about Middle East policy – go argue about Middle East policy. It has nothing to do with the matter at hand, other than to serve as evidence of continuing moral equivalence on the part of Ms. Frisch’s political partisans.

Dan Someone:
Yes. Let’s review, shall we?

“Or if right wingers had sufficient reading comprehension skills to recognize that Gavin’s original post was all about Confederate Yankee’s idiotic attempt to tar Teh Left as Frisch-deifying toddler-molesters solely because Teh Left had not Risen Up As One to exile Frisch from their ranks Immediately And Forthwith as soon as her comment was recorded by manipulating magnetized particles within some server somewhere.�

Ok – so why do you think I made the suggestion that “S,N! … {begin} and ended a post with “Deb Frisch is a reprehensible toddler rape/murder fantasist idiot� and given a link.�

I’ll give you a minute.

Time’s up. The answer is: So that S,N! and it’s commenters would *not* be drawn into a silly “Condemnation War�. So Confederate Yankee made an assertion, and instead of proving him (her) dead wrong by doing exactly what they should have done had anyone been actually thinking instead of reacting (see suggestion above), S,N! proves him right by offering a thread with a host of moral equivalencies, which you in fact state admirably – pay especial attention to your point (3): “Gavin says, in essence: 1. Who is Frisch? 2. Those were some awful, stupid and awful stupid things she said. 3. In any case, if the entire Left is to be tarred by its “silence� about this unknown Frisch, then I guess we should tar the entire Right based on its silence about a whole raft of other stuff. Yes? Or are you just being a hypocrite, CY?�

And then there’s this choice bit: “Oh, and in case there is any doubt: I don’t give a rat’s ass about what Frisch wrote.�

Yet you continue to post a little less than 500 words about the subject. What happens to your keyboard when you *do* care about a subject?

g:

“Oh for fuck’s sake. What a drama queen you are. I have no doubt that she wanted to hurt and anger Jeff as much as she could, and went over the line to do it. But, please. the child was an abstraction to her – it was something to use to “get toâ€? Jeff.â€?

Please see my response to Xavier above.

“And as long as we’re talking about protecting the poor little child, what do you think about someone who blogs away about slapping people in the face with his cock, dog-fucking, fingering people’s sisters, smearing shit on people – and then on the very same blog brings up the subject of his toddler?â€?

Well g, I think more of them than I do of those who use the concept of someone else’s child to try to score cheap partisan points. Like you.

“The image of Jeff furiously typing away all these ugly fantasies while his child sleeps in the other room is pretty creepy, isn’t it?�

And here we start to see some serious equivalencies emerge: It almost seems like you want it to read a bit like – “Yeah, Deb did something wrong, but that GOLDSTEIN is a creepy ugly fantasist with a child! And we know what creepy ugly fantasists do to their children, don’t we?!?!? And to top it off, he’s a conservative! (crowd gasps) Call CPS! Get your pitchforks� Exeunt mob.

But that’s really not what you meant, is it g?

Ah, Gratis! my favorite response of the bunch:

“Translation:
This place is crawling with angry leftists and angry liberals, who have rape fantasies about opponents’ children, making them psychologically unhealthy. Because, of course, when Whatsherface made those comments to JG she was speaking for us all.�

Translation:
I can’t really find anything to argue with you about, so I’ll just pull together some of your quotes dealing with different questions, make them mean what I’m certain that you meant (you being a meanie conservative and all), and pretend there’s some standard of intellectual rigor in what I’ve done.
Or you could just be a University Psychology professor.
rj:
#1 – ibid response to Xavier.

“Not at all life-threatening to children: A gun in the house. Under the control of Jeff Goldstein, who can barely form a coherent sentence let alone figure out how to keep it out of reach of kids.�

Leaving aside your complete ignorance regarding the Goldstein household, a second amendment debate is not fruitful here. The law allows one to protect one’s family in one’s own home with deadly force. If you truly have a problem with that, there are alternatives. Like Cuba. As a bonus, I hear they have universal health care.

But again, different subject, different debate.

Kamrom:

“And where exactly did you dream up the “need� to use the word fuck? I use that word bc it’s a useful word, fuckball. If you perceive a need, that’s something about you…
You just wanted some cheap moral superiority, but I doubt that anyone was impressed. If cussing offends you so much, then fuck off to someplace else. Or stick around and argue- but stop fucking whining, either way.�

See, this is what I was talking about – you’re so busy being transgressive with all the profanity, you’ve completely missed the point. You *want* to sound like a tough guy, but what you *really* sound like is a 13 year old who just read “The Catcher in the Rye� for the first time last night.

Here’s where your reading comprehension fails you: I never said I was (nor have I been throughout my visit here) offended, nor have I presumed any authority, moral or otherwise. It sounds as though you want that to be the case, but you lose on that score Kamron.

“And if you think that those two things are so different that one is suitable for a joke while the other is so horrifying as to be unmentionable, you are a moral idiot.�

Oh – I take it back it *does* in fact sound a bit like the stench of moral authority … oh, wait, … those are your words. You do realize you’ve condemned most of your fellow travelers here with that statement, yes?

I’m sorry, but your point, however much heat it generates, doesn’t hold up to the light very well. You want to conflate High School locker-room humor with serious, serial threatening language. For what purpose? Moral Equivalence, it looks like.

And that is (have a friend help you out here) Exactly. What. Your. Opponents. Have. Been. Accusing. You. Of.*

“Except for the flipping through the thesaurus part. You are like the millionth person in the history of the net to try the upper-class-Englishman-bowtie schtick- “my word old chap, I find these proceedings to be quite uninteresting, what with their repeated profanities and ad hominems!� For the record, it wasn’t impressive the first 999,999 times, and it isn’t working for you, either.�

Ah yes, you have me there; I am indeed a bowtied, thesaurus-toting wanna-be Englishman.

Lo Ping Wang:

Thank you for the kind words. I did indeed try to be nice. Your expressions of gentleness are like unto dew in the desert, what with my vapors and all. And my bowtie. And thesaurus.

flawed plan:

Your post is the cherry on top. If the bozos posting here can read it and not understand the deep universal irony it reveals in all the profanity and personal insults that have preceded it on this thread, then no wonder they can’t distinguish between psuedo-tough talk and genuine existential threats.

I’m sorry if I missed anyone other than the obvious ad hominem slingers, but this will be my last visit here.

I wish everyone joy of their … um … philosophy.

*Sorry for the preposition, it seems my thesaurus was of little use to me there.

You did it much better than I did, though.

Smug members of the privileged class like him, however, will never get it. But it never hurts to try.

And don’t let them drag you down – take care of yourself!

The well-intentioned Patterico has been reminding me of nothing so much as my childhood abusers, who would babble similar rationalizations to me, to each other and to themselves in their desperation to justify their atrocities, dick-slapping jokes and the Majikthise fantasy were the soundtrack kids like me grow up with.

Evil feeds on secrecy but this American subculture is out there and some people here actually get that, and the fact that it entails the jokes/warnings and imminent reality that those jokes lead to.

I grew up a target of the sort of depraved bonhomie under discussion which I always and instantly recognize whether said by Goldstien or Frisch. To these people they’re just jokes, to others they are inflictions and what is inflicted is horrible.

The rationalizations for the jokes are much more more sinister than the jokes themselves, if you don’t get that then spend time thinking about why that is. I grew up being manipulated by that unctuous, evenhanded reasoning you, Patterico, remind me of, you an unwitting collaborator, will you leave here a knowing abdicator, using ignorance as alibi no matter how shaky the ground?

Those jokes are a language you may not recognize, because it’s never been inflicted on you, I doubt you would like it. The language may not always accompany actual physical abuse, but know that this is the language of abusers. Savor that, the connections we survivors make when we encounter it. Too bad, isn’t it?

Too bad how it triggers, bewilders and hounds you the rest of your life. You think liberals are just picking fights out of thin air? I don’t say “NO!” as fast as the sadly no crowd, I grew up afraid to interrogate my own indoctrination. After 20+ years of deprogramming by good, humanistic psychologists, I have a clue, a green light that says I may proceed to de-pacify, even though I’m afraid I’m going to get my ASS KICKED, I get to have a visceral reaction to jokes about dick-slapping and touching sister’s secret places.

What’s wrong here is, in wingnut circles, is my reaction, saner people just notice with an open mind that words can destabilize, retraumatize and even spiral some poor souls into brief reactive psychosis. You may think I’m being hyperbolic, but I’m the one who lives to make this small, smaller than you and smaller than my caregiver/murderers, because there is no squaring the evil in the acts they subjected me to. That’s what pasty’s defenders activate in me, my abusers who were my family, playing on my old fear and loyalty because using me made them happy and of course I asked for it, and my own resistance is all that stands in the way of making incest fun for me. Any hint of protest would lead to greater violation, and any problems I have reconciling all this means I also possess a failure to forgive.

That’s what brutal, sexualized language does, and that’s ok in all the unsafe people and places over and over world without end. It takes work to confront that, in part because admitting what semantics can activate in me is humiliating, and I’m trying to get passed humiliation.

To recover means to confront, to confront means saying no. The last couple days here are helping me do a kind of work beyond any small mind’s conception and to hell with anyone who would minimize that.

Anyway, at the time, I condemned Hettle and so did plenty of others. PD was a shrill fool, but Hettle shouldn’t have taken a blustering blogspat offline to PD’s thesis supervisor by misusing his academic status.

And where exactly did you dream up the “need” to use the word fuck? I use that word bc it’s a useful word, fuckball. If you perceive a need, that’s something about you…
You just wanted some cheap moral superiority, but I doubt that anyone was impressed. If cussing offends you so much, then fuck off to someplace else. Or stick around and argue- but stop fucking whining, either way.

If it suits you to find parallels between child rape fantasies and personal insults…

It does when the ‘personal insults’ are also sexual assault fantasies. And the child rape fantasies are also personal insults. The only differentiating factor here is sexual assault of a minor v sexual assault of an adult, despite the very different labels you apply in order to excuse the one.
And if you think that those two things are so different that one is suitable for a joke while the other is so horrifying as to be unmentionable, you are a moral idiot.

I tend to write the way I would speak to you if we were standing face-to-face.

Except for the flipping through the thesaurus part. You are like the millionth person in the history of the net to try the upper-class-Englishman-bowtie schtick- “my word old chap, I find these proceedings to be quite uninteresting, what with their repeated profanities and ad hominems!”
For the record, it wasn’t impressive the first 999,999 times, and it isn’t working for you, either.

Once again, the arbitrary line:
jokes about sexually assaulting adults (or, people whose age is unknown) = ‘yo momma’-level, harmless
jokes about sexually assaulting minors = absolutely intolerable, turn off the internets

Patty, if you have kids, I hope they get anally raped (*gasp*)… when they turn 18! (relieved laughter).

The school yard “I screwed yo’ momma� chants imply the momma is willing.

You make up a bad analogy, and then claim that the original statement has to conform to the analogy *in every way*. You are damn stupid. I mean, really, genuinely dumb.
As dumb as: “bumblebees look like honeybees- therefore, bumblebees have stingers!”
As dumb as: “saying ‘fuck yo mama’ is the moral equivalent of saying ‘ go fuck yourself’. And fucking yourself is impossible. Ergo, it’s impossible to fuck your own mother.”

Commenter #3 who it’s not worth talking to.

translation: commenter number 3 who’s caught me in a transparent idiotic lie and fucked me up. Funny how you get tired of the conversation just about the time you’re picking up your teeth. Conveniently, you can now avoid responding to the substantive proof that you’re full of shit.

Because he lives for the Blog Fight?

With the enthusiastic support of none other than Jeff Goldstein. Why is it that whenever a blogfight gets totally out of hand, he’s somehow involved?