Better Conservatives? Where?! (A response to Coffeecat)

[Stanislaus]

@Scylla

My background is both conservative and one where insults are pretty much background noise.

I’ll say! Look how that whole “brazen slut” post started:

@Scylla

I have lost all hope for you people.
This place really has turned into the left-wing moron society.

If anyone takes offence at that, it’s their fault for not understanding Scylla’s background. Not his. Why, where he comes from, this is basically flirting. If it sounds to you like belligerent contempt you probably won’t be able to appreciate the ironic, witty subtlety of his argument here, and you’d likely overlook the masterful use of language entirely:

As 2012 rolls along Obama, like any good Democrat, knows he needs to court one of his biggest bases, stupid, easily manipulated women.

So what he does make up this issue that “Hey, Catholic universities should have to offer birth control” which he knows is unconstitutional, but it’s the gesture that counts, and if they can’t do it, then insurance companies can, right?

Then he gets this brazen slut to chum the waters for stupid Republican by suggesting we should pay for her birth control (when you pay for my beer I’ll consider it.)

Now that a couple of people said this was a bad idea and Rush called the brazen slut, a “slut,” Obama can call her up and offer her his sympathies and show he cares about women’s rights , and thereby secure the vote of stupid and easily manipulated women.

The tragedy is that by this point you’re probably so riled up by your unflexible approach to the associations of Scylla’s language that you’ll likely mistake this perfectly constructed and really well-intentioned metaphor as ugly contempt for women who disagree with Scylla:

I don’t who the dumbest morons are

Is it the stupid easily manipulated women for whom this is targeted, who seem to enjoy the passive aggressive manipulation and are drawn to it the way a hooker is drawn to the abusive charisma of her pimp?

Now, of course its likely (practically a certainty) that some of the women who did think this issue was a big deal (and were thus easily manipulate dolts akin to abused and exploited sex workers, yadda yadda) were posting in that very thread. I think it’s worth pointing out now that it’s unlikely in the extreme that this idea had ever occured to Scylla, still less the obvious implication that he was thus directly insulting posters in what many would consider to fairly gross terms. As we discover below, Scylla has very strong opinions about the propriety of using derogatory sexual terms to refer to specific women. (Some might say he sees the cultural and repressive associations of this language as hard and built in.)

Let’s all take a moment now to think of Scylla, and the wounding shock he felt when people made some totally unjustified and dogmatic assumptions about what he really meant when he posted the above, and concluded - so falsely! - that he was being deliberately offensive in some way.

Luckily of course, he comes from a background where insults are just noise, so the frankly unjustified response was all water off a duck’s back.

But no!

@Scylla

Iandyiii:

Perhaps I was asked. I did not notice. I was more focused and appalled by the attack on my kid. I think suggesting that I ignored good faith attempts at understanding is false, and I hope that is not the implication. The environment was hostile and not conducive to understanding. Nobody there was doing anything to stop the people that were attacking me and my family in an over the top fashion. This is fine. It’s not there job. I was there willingly, and it was my own mess, but if they were not interested criticizing that, I can’t give a fuck about their criticism of me.

“The environment was hostile, and not conducive to understanding.” Never were truer or sadder words written. Quite how the environment came to be hostile, and just how the positive atmosphere of good-faith exploration of opposing ideas that Scylla had worked so diligently to create and nurture had so speedily evaporated, are mysteries we shall never truly plumb.

In other words,

1. If you’re going to come into a thread like Billy Big-balls and play the “I’m just forthright, plain-spoken; I use my words my way and if you’re upset that’s your problem, not mine” card and then turn around and play the “You’re all being terribly mean so I can’t possibly be expected to face up to your criticism” card when the atmosphere inexplicably turns sour.

2. “I was just being ironic”? No, you were being crudely offensive about women to own the libs, and it worked better than you thought. At least own it.