Mandlestam, can you not follow a thread?

The BBQ Pit
1

You know, M, you seem reasonably bright at times, but this must be the third or fourth time you’ve responded to me in a thread and demonstrated a total inability to remember what you’re replying to, or even bother to read what you were replying to in the first place, or follow the points that other people in the thread are making (and it’s not just me) and, most of all, to just completely, utterly miss the central point. Frankly, it’s irritating as hell, which is why you have the honor of being the first SDMB member I’ve ever pitted, which I wouldn’t have done except that you decided to start throwing insults around in GD. I could have explained myself better in there, but you escalated it, so here we go.

the Thread In Question

So let me get the ball rolling; FUCKING LEARN TO READ! Christ! I’d try to go through the thread explaining where you went off track and why you’re lost in space, but if I did explain it you’d get lost, just as you did the first time, and have on many occasions before. So let me REALLY, REALLY CAREFULLY explain the original post you totally misunderstood and felt obliged to insult me over.

For the benefit of those who are wondering what’s pissing me off, here is the part that went over Mandlestam’s head. It was in response to some theorizing over what excuses people who claimed there were no WMDs in Iraq would use if some were actually found:

Now, let me sum this up:

No matter how nasty some dictator is he will always have apologists on the extreme relevant end of the political spectrum. For instance, many leftists (NOT ALL, MANDLESTAM!) love Castro and Lenin. To use a right-wing example, there is Augusto Pinochet.

Now, M, let me really, really carefully go through this, line by line, because you seem to have a problem with my writing nobody else in the world has:

“Over time, the more virulent partisans, conspiracy theorists and campus communists…”

Okay, did you catch that? “THE MOST VIRULENT PARTISANS,” etc. Note the reference to conspiracy theorists, who are properly disdained on this board as nutters, and communists, who are extremists. Your stupid claim that I was taking “the entire class” of people on the left wing of the political spectrum and generalizing about them is false. So get over that, okay? I wasn’t talking about you, unless you are in fact a Communist or a conspiracy theorist. It’s false. I wasn’t. I don’t care about you. Fucking shut up about a generalization that wasn’t there. Now, it’s possible you assumed that the throwaway reference to “Campus leftists” meant that all people left of dead middle who go to a school will be big fans of Saddam Hussein, in which case I must apologize for confusing you with a post longer than seventy-five words that wasn’t proofread quite as well as “The Nation.” I assumed everyone would get it. You can’t read each sentence without considering the other sentences. It’s called “Context.”

And then I made the terrible mistake of trying to point out that this was NOT just a left-wing extremist thing; it’s universal to all blindnesses. In fact, I consciously did this in an attempt to NOT just bash the left side of things, but to throw some equal bashing around:

“If you don’t believe me, look how many people are big fans of Fidel Castro, Lenin, **and, to throw in a right-wing favourite,**Pinochet.”

Now, let me re-emphasize that:

TO THROW IN A RIGHT-WING FAVOURITE

And your amazing response? You said it was stupid of me to assert left-winger would be fans of Pinochet. Because, silly me, I said he was a favourite of… uh, the right wing. Are you retarded? Do you not know your right from your left? To use an old Army joke, it’s your military right, dummy. To your credit, you conveniently forgot this part in your second post. Instead you went back to the mention of Lenin.

It is now your assertion, to my astonishment, that I think Lenin is the same as Saddam Hussein. This apparently is proof that I am stupid and ignorant. Sigh. Suffice to say that what you really need is some education in the concept of set theory. Try doing a Google for “Venn Diagrams” and study them, and consider this stunning and yet absolutely true fact:

It is possible for two things to share one or more critical similarities even when most of their characteristics are not shared.

Had you understood my post, which you didn’t, you would understand I was comparing the two men in terms of just TWO data points that were similar. Two. That’s the number right after 1 but that comes just before 3. Are they otherwise similar? Of course not, they are different in innumerable ways. But in terms of WHAT I WAS FUCKING TALKING ABOUT… that unpalatable dictators always have legions of fans… it’s relevant.

To illustrate an example, it would be reasonable for me to compare the batting statistics of Ty Cobb and Jackie Robinson and say “Hey, these two guys hit about the same number of home runs!”, even though otherwise they were totally different kinds of ballplayers, and in fact were totally, utterly different men (Robinson was a brave, honorable man; Cobb was an evil son of a bitch) and otherwise dissimilar in almost every single way except that they hit roughly the same number of homers. Or I might point out that both wasps and eagles have wings, and that this represents a similarity - even though the two animals are, other than having wings, nothing alike. The extremely small, limited comparison to Lenin is exactly the same as those; I was pointing out that dictators who killed people - which, by the way, would include a lot of people dissimilar from Saddam Hussein - have fans, not that Lenin and Hussein are identical, or even particularly similar. There was simply no room for misinterpretation in my post; you just totally invented it, and laid on this incredibly thick “You are an ignorant moron” trip based on what was, let’s face it, a pretty mild and limited comparison.

On top of all this, you were off-topic and didn’t even understand the point anyway. If I asked you, without going back, to explain the post or what the thread was about, I don’t believe you could do it.

After this, you then threw in some uncalled-for choice jabs at my intelligence and my education, and carried on with the claim that I was insulting all leftists.

Well, I’ve probably lost you by now, since this is a long post. I am sure by now it’s in your head that I’m trying to insult everyone who voted for Michael Dukakis, and when I reinforced the reference to “Pinochet,” your brain probably now remembers that I said “Allende” and asserted that he ate live kittens. So let me throw in a few parting thoughts you might remember:

  1. Shut the fuck up. You want to insult me, take it here. I’m quite confident in the worthiness of my brains and my educational achievements, and I don’t see fit to be comparing degrees and diplomas with some dumbass on a message board who does not know the difference between the words “right” and “left.”

  2. Maybe I’m not good at writing clear, unambiguous posts. Maybe it really is as confusing to read my stuff as your lack of comprehension would suggest. Maybe when I typed the word “Right” I somehow imprinted some magical Confusion Spell on it so that you read it as “Left.” But, quite frankly, you’re the only one who seems to have this level of comprehension difficulty with them. Nobody else on this board, after 4000+ posts, has ever had such a terrible time understanding what I was trying to say. So I must conclude that the problem is likely with your reading skills, not my writing skills, and I will continue to try to contribute to the board. (Of course, maybe nobody else understands my writing, but they don’t care enough to go to the trouble of insulting me about it.)

  3. Get off your partisan high horse. You were not the subject of the thread or the post. There was no attempt to smear you, to smear all leftists or Democrats or anything of the sort. It says a lot about you that you took a shot at RIGHT-WING nutbars as being a shot at… you. Or, people you identify as being leftists like you. Are you a right-wing nutbar? No? Then shut up.

Sorry, everyone. This was a long, boring, pointless rant, but since Mandelstam decided to resort to insults, I took it here.

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Well this was just a matter of time…

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So you’re saying all leftists are exactly like right wingers except that they don’t eat kittens?

4

What if I’m a right-wing conspiracy nut who hates Ty Cogg, but who happens to be a communist Pinochet supporter and voted for Dukakis?

5

You know. Ty Cogg! The famous GaseGall player!

6

This is a very mild sort of hijack (you did bring up baseball), but one other similarity between the two is that both were daring and highly successful baserunners with celebrated steals of home.

Otherwise, good example. :slight_smile:

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Hamlet, we may have had some disagreements in the past over various issues large and small, but man, that just made me laugh like a motherfucker

8

Amen. Excellent recovery, Hamlet.

9

Fuck you if you don’t like Ty Cogg. He kicked Gabe Ruth’s ass.

10

Huh?

That rather trivial bit was worth a Pitting?

Hell, RickJay I thought you overreacted in your first response to Mandelstam.

[sub]At least I got here while this was still live. When Daniel Withrow got Pitted the other day, everyone was kissing and making up already before I knew the thread existed.[/sub]

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Water under the bridge. I’m glad I could make you smile.

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Sign me up.

Your changing the subject of the quote in question, aren’t you? You made two comments:

So I see you associate four groups here: “virulent partisans”, “conspiracy theorists”, “campus communists”, and “campus leftists”. Now, a reasonable reader of your prose may conclude that you consider all these groups in a similar light. You yourself agree that the reference to conspiracy theorists was a reference to “nutters”. Is it that hard to understand why someone might think that you also believe “campus leftists” are “nutters”? Do you understand that Mandelstam self-identified as a campus leftist? So who was insulting whom?

But this is the part I really like:

The first sentence appears to be your contention. The second sentence, presumably, was to support your contention. But now you claim that Pinochet was tossed in to poke fun at the right wing. But that wouldn’t really support your assertion, now would it? Perhaps you meant to say that the fact that he was a brutal, secular fascist won’t slow down the extremists at all. But that wasn’t what you said. You made an explicit point to discredit the left wing.

You go on to apologize for your sloppy wording, but fail to recognize that your sloppy wording is the whole enchilada here. If you had attacked extremists on both sides in a balanced manner, I doubt that she would have even responded.

And just curious:

Is that a generalization? Or do you recognize that each man had both positive and negative qualities, and that only their public personas developed into such a drastic dichotomy? Is everything good or evil, black or white, to you?

Pot. Kettle. Black.

Get real. You started with the partisan bullshit, and put Mandelstam in a position to defend against it. And now you accuse her of getting partisan. [Bugs]It is to laugh.[/Bugs]

I also note, that in her follow-up, she pointed out how the Pinochet reference was a non-sequitor. She was dead-on, unless you want to clarify your contention.

By the way, where did she insult you? I’ve reviewed the thread, and the closest I can find is:

Seems quite factual. The only possible insult is if you believe that in an entire class of people, many would not be a lot better educated than you are. But based on your comments in that thread and this thread, I don’t think you’ve left much to doubt there.

Take a chill pill. Her posts in that thread were no more worthy of a pit rant than yours were. To get all uppity and indignant just looks silly.

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Well ! wouldn’t you be a little distracted if you died in a Gulag near Vladivostok in 1938.

Also, you could try and get the spelling right, this most fragrant of contributors goes by the name Mandelstam, not Mandlestam. And only yesterday I learned of a Jane Austen reference to anal sex in Mansfield Park because of Mandelstam, so I’m much indebted.

I also think the OP is a serious waste of everyone’s time, although the notion of Mandelstam having a pit thread is pleasingly surreal - perhaps like His4ever in dominatrix leather and cookin’

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:eek:

Fill me in!

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A bit of confusion there, I’m afraid, Stoid. Ms. Austen was merely confusing the “servants entrance” with the “back door” which was further misunderstood by depraved deconstructionist grad students. Best evidence to date indicates that Ms. Austen believed that humans reproduced by means of polite correspondence.

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Those are pretty fair generalizations.

Take Cobb. On the plus side, one of the greatest players ever, who donated $100,000 to build a hospital. On the negative side, plenty. Here’s how the guy who wrote his autobiography saw him, in the last year of his life (from Booklist, 10/15/94):

“a raging, near-psychotic, bilious man who carried $1 million in negotiable securities and a loaded gun with him at all times; a man consumed with hate, who had alienated all those close to him over 73 years of life; a man whose phenomenal, still-unmatched achievements in baseball (a .367 lifetime batting average, for example) seemed fueled by rage–at the death of his father, killed accidentally by his mother; at umpires, opponents, and teammates alike; and, especially, at blacks, toward whom Cobb spewed racist venom throughout his life.”

My favorite was the time he went into the stands and stomped senseless a fan who had been jawing at him. It turned out the guy had been crippled in an industrial accident and lost most of his fingers. When told of this, Cobb said “I don’t care if he doesn’t have any feet.”

He’s also alleged to have beaten up a black stadium employee who committed the sin of trying to shake his hand. And then whaling on his wife when she tried to come to her husband’s rescue.

A real sweetheart.
What’s the speed record for total disintegration of a pit thread?

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Eh, the link in the OP takes me to a “Reply With Quote” window.

The plain thread.
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=174746

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Can I assume you didn’t mean this in a literal sense as the distance between us is daunting even for my considerable booze-induced, Friday night ardour.

Anyway, fill I will; a thoroughly entertaining thread called ‘The Victorians: Sex, Gender, Etiquette and Morality’ – it left me a little breathless, I must say … Relevant passage, about 2/3 down page one:
Lamia - “Mansfield Park is also, to my knowledge, the only Austen novel with a joke about anal sex.”

** Mandelstam** – “Depends how much Eve Sedgwick you read”

  • etc.

Damn, no idea why but I suddenly feel like leaping into jodhpurs and charging off into the night …
Btw Stoid, can I suggest you return to your thread in GD as **‘luci **has deposited the most frightful steaming mess bang in the middle – he’s gorn all BBC nature programme cum pre-history fable-ish. I think …

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<snort>

That’s what you think! Anyway, it’s common knowledge that Jane Austen was an incestuous lesbian. So there!

Mandelstam was probably referring to an essay called Jane Austen and the Masturbating Academic – a bit of slash fanfic about literary scholars getting hot & sweaty with the own fantasies. :wink:

**
I think it’s one post. This thread has indeed been turdburgled.

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Sorry I’m late to the party, I’ve had some out-of-town guests keeping me busy and just saw this last night.

Rick, I thought I’d made very clear in my first post that I was responding “as a campus leftist” (note also the bolding of the offending sentence in my first citation from your post. It’s just too broad a term for you to use when you are basically singling out categories of loons or extremists for ridicule. Does that really surprise you? I expected you to reply to me by retracting the broad term but instead, even here in your OP, you’ve dodged the term as much as possible (as AZCowboy has already pointed out). I know you to be reasonable enough sort of person. Perhaps I touched a nerve that made you less disposed to make amends than to shut your eyes and dig in deeper.

On the matter of Pinochet: as I said in my second post (and as AZ has here clarified), your mention of him was, as you yourself made clear, a non-sequitur. The reason I responded as I did in my first post is that I genuinely thought that you were suggesting that some “campus leftists” were enthusiasts of right-wing dictators such as Pinochet. Why would I think you would be alleging such a crazy thing? Well, b/c your whole point was to say that “campus leftists” would soon be “big fans” of Saddam Hussein. You’ll have to excuse me if I’d don’t see much difference between Pinochet and Hussein, neither of whom is likely to be admired by any “campus leftist” of sound mind..

On the use of the term “campus communists”: had you stuck to this term I probably wouldn’t have been so defensive, though I’ll take this opportunity to clarify something. I’m not sure what the situation in Canada is, but here in the States you’ll find many self-identified “leftists” on campus but few will be “communists” per se. OTOH, many self-identified “leftists,” myself included, consider themselves to be Marxists of some stripe. This has to do with the importance given to Marxist philosophy–as a method of intellectual inquiry–in the way that we approach our work. To be a Marxist, or Marxian, means to approach a subject by paying a lot of attention to the specific social relations that produced it. It also means, usually, that you think very highly of Marx’s thought: e.g., his analysis of the commodity form which to my mind is absolutely brilliant. It does not (necessarily) mean that you are member of any communist/socialist party, or that you are seeking to overthrow capitalism, or to eliminate private property. All of that said, I have come across people who are still committed to a purely socialist ideal of some kind, and I think it would be fair to call such people “communists.” However, I would like to dispute the implication that such people are loonies, and particularly to dispute the allegation that such people are likely ever to admire Saddam Hussein.

On Lenin: I never said that you said Hussein and Lenin were exactly alike; of course, you are free to compare individuals on the basis of one point of comparison. But what you’re forgetting is that the purpose of your comparison was to “prove” the tendency for “campus leftists” to embrace murderous dictators. Now I will go to my grave believing that you will never find a sane “campus leftist” who admires Saddam Hussein. But there are many reasons for people with strong socialist beliefs to continue to admire aspects of Lenin’s life: at the very least, to be willing to weigh the good against the bad. Although one can debate whether Lenin supported Stalin or resisted him, Lenin certainly never intended to be a dictator or even a bureaucrat; whereas there’s almost nothing good to be said about Stalin.

As **London Calling ** has slyly pointed out, Mandelstam is the name of a Russian poet who was persecuted and imprisoned by Stalin. I should note that despite really liking Mandelstam (and being of Russian descent IRL), I’m not really an expert on the Russian Revolution. Still, I know enough to know that though you might find some “campus leftists” who admire Lenin, you’d be a far cry from proving that “campus leftists” are likely ever to be “big fans” of Saddam Hussein.

Finally, Rick, I never meant to insult either your intelligence or your education. If it seemed otherwise, it was probably b/c in the past, no matter what our disagreements, I have always been struck by your ample
endowments of both. The “campus leftist” crack struck me as churlish and beneath you.

AZ, thanks for doing all the hard work.

TruthSeeker, long time no spar! :wink:
Mandelstam was probably referring to an essay called Jane Austen and the Masturbating Academic – a bit of slash fanfic about literary scholars getting hot & sweaty with the own fantasies. :wink: "

Ahhhh… The sweet timber of a true campus leftist in action… :wink: