**iamnotbatman **is exactly right. Many things that appear boring are actually interesting when viewed within the proper context. Acting dismissive toward something that you haven’t taken the time to try to figure out is condescending and elitist.
This doesn’t mean the everyone has a duty to learn to appreciate everything. Life is short and there is much to do. But it does mean that it’s more honest to refrain from passing value judgments on works or activities that you only have a casual acquaintance with.
If you cant be bothered to back up your allegations of douchebaggeryism, then you might as well just type “Scummy is a poophead and I dont like him”. Then we can ignore you as just another retard.
What the fuck? Can you not link to the post or something? All I see a thread about William Wallace, and Cat botherers link is a post where Scumpup laments that child support isnt always a fair system.
If you are going to drop in and ask us to agree with your hatred of your nemesis, at least give us something to work with.
I am not Alice the Goon’s nemesis. It’s implicit in being someone’s nemesis that you devote time, thought, and emotion towards that person’s undoing. Until s/he turned up in this thread today, I didn’t remember that we had an** Alice the Goon**. Even though it risks of making a pretentious, psuedo-intellectual douchebag of myself, I’d say a better description is that I am **Alice the Goon’s **bête noire.
And yet, in the thread linked by Scumpup, there were people who explicitly stated that they had taken the time to read and think about particular authors like Shakespeare, but that they still found themselves bored by those works. And instead of saying to them, “Well, if you’ve taken the time to read Shakspeare and figure it out, and you still find his work boring, then that’s fine,” you continued to wade in with accusations of ignorance and lack of life experience.
For example, Martini Enfield made clear that he had read Shakespeare and seen Shakespeare performed and still doesn’t find Shakespeare interesting. This was not a case of “[a]cting dismissive toward something that [he hadn’t] taken the time to try to figure out”; he was saying that he had taken the time, and still found it uninteresting. Yet instead of accepting his assessment as a valid personal opinion based on experience and familiarity, you basically said that the only reason he finds Shakespeare uninteresting is that he doesn’t understand it well enough.
So, apparently if someone doesn’t appreciate something that you feel is worth appreciating, it is only because they have not made an honest effort at appreciation, and thus remain ignorant. I guess you are not only the arbiter of whether something is good or not, but also of whether other people (people you don’t even know) have made sufficient effort to appreciate it.
iamnotbatman, just out of curiosity, do you apply this same philosophy to, say, Monster Trucks? Do you feel like you need to really watch a couple of dozen episodes of Gossip Girl before you decide if it’s for you?
Yes. Absolutely. I would not pass judgment on Monster Trucks, Pro Wrestling, or Gossip Girl. You know why? Because I’m not pretentious (despite being sophomorically painted as such in this thread). Because I have the humility to know, from experience, that people are not dumb. There is a reason people like X, and until I know that I understand that reason, I am not going to dismiss it. And there are plenty of supposedly lowbrow things that I enjoy, and have appreciated, after becoming familiar enough with them. Hell, I watched the whole first season of Buffy The Vampire Slayer before being willing to dismiss it, only to find out that all of the lovers were right – I do see what they see in it, and I’m glad I put in the effort to get through that first season.
mhendo – I operate by the maxim that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. If one is going to be dismissive of Shakespeare, I expect something more insightful from them beyond “I have read/watched Shakespeare.” It’s like, if you say “Einstein was a terrible physicist,” I am going to assume you are ignorant unless you can offer a more compelling argument than “I have read Einstein.”
Do you not see how one of those statements is different from the other?
You can be dismissive of someone who says “Shakespeare contributed nothing to the canon of English literature” just as you can be of someone who says “Einstein was a sucky physicist” Why? because those statements refer to factual conclusions about a person that can be proven (to the extent of the proof available) with evidence.
“I dislike Shakespeare’s writings” “I think he’s a fucking bore” are irrefutable propositions.
I remember debating with iamnotbatman in another thread about lateness (his replies to me start at 167), and I didn’t full understand what bugged me about his “style” until the OP of this thread pointed it out. I was using some colloquial internet terms to illustrate a lighthearted tone, which he took to mean that I was unable to point out the many flaws of his argument. If he doesn’t have aspergers, then pseudo-intellectual twat it is.
This is hilarious (to me). He’s declaring this “don’t judge it because you don’t know it” opinion, but the previous exchange I had with him, I was reiterating this exact point again and again, and his replies basically boiled down to “Nope! Inconsiderate! Or dumb! Or sociopath!”
I plead with anyone here to actually read the thread that Grapefruit links to here, because not only is his assessment of me unbelievably dense, his own behavior in that thread has to be some of the most obnoxious I’ve ever encountered at the SDMB. I could easily turn that exchange alone into a Pit.
ETA: I particularly love his “PWNED” and “LOL” that he peppers about. I honestly thought he might be 10 years old.
