I was stunned at what I found over at IBTP when I followed PP’s link. I found industrial grade stupidity. I found a cult of victimization, an endless variation on the theme “nobody loves me, everybody hates me, I’m going in my closet and eat worms”. I found a tight-focus arrogance, a cultural hubris almost beyond understanding. The belief, for example, that NOBODY can be enlightened except them. That they can be the final arbiters of all that is good in the world. And coincidently, it’s just people they know and like. Everybody else is the enemy. Plus, the patronizing arrogance in “I’m not deleting this comment even though it has mis-spelling and html errors”. That would only be something less than idiotic if they had a blog-wide policy of deleting comments for mis-spellings. But again, the “us” gets a pass while the “them” gets the back of their oh-so-righteous hand.

But mostly, I was pissed because them made a bunch of assumptions about me. Yes, I am a “liberal dude”. And in knowing that, you know NOTHING about me. You don’t know my history, you don’t know my actions, you don’t know my passions. And yet you play a smug little game where you can describe me in whatever terms you wish? Know what? It’s not at all surprising to me that Twisty’s a racist – she’s got the instincts.

Anyway, it’s been bugging me for a couple days, and I’m not willing to go back over there for anything, so I came back to this old thread to leave it. Like Jillian said, it felt good to say it…

mikey

That was annoying. See what comes of posting at five in the morning?

This failure to communicate is frustrating. I am not a “liberal� or a “feminist�, I’m just a person with a set of ideals. My thoughts are not exactly the same as every other person in my vague category.

I expect to disagree with everyone at some point.

Totally agree with you on that one. It’s just the difference is that when you disagree with me, the worst thing that might happen is that I might call you an asshole (which, I freely admit, still isn’t very temperate, thoughtful, or helpful. My defense in this case is that I’m human, imperfect, screw things up sometimes, and am working on getting better). Apparently, when you disagree with others, you get called an enemy of the people. It was unattractive when Lenin did it, and it’s just as unattractive when anyone else does it. Save that for people who really are your enemy – not for allies with whom you have tactical differences.

This is why “Life of Brian” makes me laugh as hard as it does…..that running joke about the silliness of progressive movements is so, so, so true.

And that being said, baseball is just weird. If you like baseball, you must be all about oppressing women. Or Micronesians. Or something.

Well in that case she’s right, but geez. It’s correct on one level to say that everyone’s racist, sexist, etc, but then it must follow that if it isn’t put into context, by which i mean accounted for but then assumed rather than continually rehashed, then one comes to another correct maxim: ‘if everyone’s a racist, then one one is.’

These fucking people cannot seem to handle heirarchy in anything; with them it’s all or nothing. It’s just systematic in their thought, a continual hiccup, a feature as well as a bug: either/or instead of if/then. They have no capacity for value judgement beyond Manichaen dichotomy.

Right, just like the people at Feministe who want a world where everyone is on the same side and no one is ever called a nasty name make my blood run cold. But we are so far from that being a practical consideration that I am quite willing to put off that fight until our combined forces have fended off the fascists.

I don’t understand what goes through the head of people who call themselves feminists and yet still refer to liberals as haters of women.

Evidently they are extremely pissed off. Twisty over at IBTP informs me that I am a misogynist simply by virtue of being male. To her credit, she also says that she herself is a racist by virtue of being white. It is not exactly a laugh riot over at IBTP. Advanced blaming indeed.

Meanwhile, in the gender-neutral slag-off, I offer these alternatives to the hurtful and gratuitous “c-word.” Complete the following sentence: Ann Coulter is a _________ .

(a) vomit-crusted leprous taint
(b) rotting length of distended rectum
(c) maggot-ridden scab collection lying in a gutter overflowing with fermented piss
-or-
(d) extremely unpleasant person whose ideas do nothing to advance the cause of enlightened discourse.

Really, once you burst the bonds of cheap-shot sexism, you can get so much more disgusting. It’s liberating! ALL of our bodies are nauseating!

Speaking of which, no spitting, please. It’s tacky.

YOU IDIOT!

(spits on Jillian)

I expect to disagree with everyone at some point.

I do think choice of words is important. (Not so much on a humor site though – comedy can be offensive!) So I do not totally agree with you but to me you aren’t the enemy, just another thinking person. I don’t approve of people calling Coulter a slut or tranny or whore for example – but I don’t assume that person is some vile fiend for doing so.

What I see is a lack of self-awareness and rampant hypocrisy. Everyone looks for fault, blaming everyone else for all the problems in life, never looking inward. When *you* do something it’s bad, but when *I* do the same thing it’s ok – because I’m me! Of course there are special circumstances that explain it away…

Over at one of the interminable threads generated by all this interminable stupidity (and which I choose not to link to in order to not stir anything else up – feel free to find it yourself if you’re curious), a couple of comments were made about how, to paraphrase, liberals hate women and gay people as much as anybody else does.

And this, right here, is the heart of the difference between the two arguments being made by the two sides in this.

A little bit of background: I’m a socialist. I’m not a liberal, I’m not a Democrat; I’m a socialist. Now, I call certain liberals all sorts of names at different times – mostly when they do stuff that pisses me off. Liberals are pus-headed morons on the “free trade” issue, their understanding of property rights is fundamentally flawed, and their foundation for civil rights is built on a bed of shifting sands. Many liberals are frequently dicks.

But you will never, ever, ever hear me call them “the enemy”. You will never hear me say that they (as a class) hate women, or queers, or anything else. This is a choice I have made; I have chosen to build a coalition with liberals.

My reasons for this are pretty straightforward: there really is no viable Left in existence to work with in America anymore. The Communist Party (USA) has its collectivist head so far up its collectivist ass on so many issues that it’s not even funny – if you check their website out, they hold up China and North Korea as Good Communist States, they endorse John Kerry for president at the same time they claim to stand for the principles of revolutionary socialism. Whatever.

There are practically no active socialist groups in this country. You’ve got places like New York – but then again, New York has everything. Some of the old steel and coal belt cities still have active chapters – Cincinnati had a good one, last I checked….so places like that still have some active, organizing groups. You’ll find some hotbeds of socialism and anarchism throughout the heartland of this country – they’re the remnants of Eugene Debs American Railway Union, for the most part (Lawrence, Kansas is an anarchist nexus, believe it or not). And, much to the everlasting chagrin of socialists everywhere, the legacy of the United Mine Worker’s union out west is the Montana Freemen groups of today. Breaks my heart, especially as I’ve always loved UMW’s kickass Wobbly roots.

Why do I share all this stuff? Well, I’m a history student, and I’m a socialist, so it interests me, and like anybody else, I’ll take any excuse I can get to ramble on about a favorite topic. But more than that, it sorta establishes, at least a little, my socialist bona fides – the fact that this sort of socialist political in-group wankery is pretty much just off-the-cuff background knowledge for me helps to show that I am at least an afficionado of the field, much like the way a real baseball fan could probably quote Hank Aaron’s lifetime ERA stats off the top of his head (or whatever it is you baseball groupies do; I have no idea, so don’t shoot me).

The point of all this is that Socialists of one stripe or another are the only group of non-Conservatives who get to call liberals “the enemy” without being either completely ironic or completely hypocritical.

Technically speaking, liberals actually are my enemy. Our ultimate goals are NOT the same. Hell, I’m still bitter about the way the liberal-leaning social dems sold out the Red Berlin Soviet to the fucking Freikorps in 1919. I can’t help but wonder what would’ve happened if Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht hadn’t been murdered by the precursor-to-the-SS goons…..if the Berlin Soviet had held, the socialists might have held the Reichstag, and if they’d held the Reichstag, all of Germany might have gone Socialist, the Revolution in Russia might not have gone wrong, the French Socialists could’ve gotten their act together and with Germany’s backing made a real play for power in France…….all idle speculation, of course, but I still blame the damn liberals for it.

And yet I make a choice to work with them, because I think that we have, at least at this current juncture in history, enough of a common purpose to make that possible.

I don’t understand what goes through the head of people who call themselves feminists and yet still refer to liberals as haters of women. We already know that they call conservatives haters of women; I agree with them on that point.

But what’s left for them? If conservatives are haters of women and liberals are also haters of women, then who is left for them? Other, of course, than their own little echo chamber, carefully constructed so that they never have to interact with anyone who does not yet already agree with them – and therefore utterly powerless. And by their own design, no less.

Ultimately, what it comes down to is that this is a group of people who, when they disagree with me, call me a fucking bitch and not a traitor. That is a group of people who, when I disagree with them, will never let a rude word offend my ear, but will call me a traitor to my principles right to my face. All things considered, I know where I’d rather stand.

And damn, but did it feel good to get that out.

(posted at IBTP)

I got taken to task for calling Ann Coulter a “cunt� during the recent blog dustup and I have decided to retire the term. I would still say she’s a putrid sack of maggot-ridden pigshit, but the very fact that I would reach for “cunt� as a handy equivalent for that sort of putdown betrays the context in a way I’m no longer sanguine about. It’s very tempting to reach for the sharpest rock, but when what you get with the Boy’s Happy Hate Meal is “motherfucker� — possibly “cocksucker� (which includes me after a few beers) — while the girls get called “cunts,� I can only rationalize for so long before agreeing that it makes more sense and is much less divisive simply to call Ann Coulter a malignant, rotting length of distended rectum and avoid the ugliness of gender-based discrimination.
—
So there’s that. I still think the sandwich was funny and I still find the PC Police incredibly tiresome and I could do without the mantra of “men suck” from the RFs. But I’ll concede on “cunt” and perhaps, in a small way, make the world a less Coulterish place. Kum bay fucking ah.

A “skank� is a woman who lets more than one man fuck her, and who is therefore dirty and degraded.

No no no. A skank is probably promiscuous but that’s not what makes her dirty; her dirtiness — literally, her sleazy nasty foulness — is what makes her a skank. They have it exactly backwards. Plus this condescending bullshit that men who use this term assume that a woman who has more than one sex partner is therefore degraded is totally ludicrous. And they are complaining this about Liberal men. It’s almost as if they are so invested in their ideological agenda that their entire perception of the world is warped by…

oh.

Never mind.

Commenter: I didn’t quite mean that men are babies. That may be true, but it wasn’t what I was getting at.

Commenter: You’ve been testosterone-poisoned by hanging out at S,N too much, I think.

And so forth. Predictable man-bashing. Sounds like low blood sugar — sandwich, ladies?

READ THE FUCKING FAQ, FEMINISTE: OUR FAT JOKES ARE NOT ABOUT YOU!!!

Worse than annieangel’s, even.

Ooh, an L.A. Story reference! Well struck, sir.

Poo and Pie all around