Geez. I was so disheartened to see that thread title, I’d so enjoyed mswas’s elegant contributions to a thread I opened on “God as event”.
The thing I don’t get is, what was your intention? Really? You seem to be saying that you were trying to prove that Liberals are intolerant of intolerance. Was that it?
If that’s your goal, I think you should just argue it openly - people around here are smart enough to take it. Transgendered people put up with enough crap as it is.
But polymorphing him into either a sheep or a pig would be a distinct improvement.
Great Og, does anyone need to “prove” that? It seems so blindingly obvious as to be…well, blindingly obvious. I’ll gladly step up and acknowledge that I’m intolerant of bigoted, ignorant intolerance.
This “Devil’s Advocate” claim is total bullshit. One does not play the DA by putting forth “arguments” which are total filth as if one believed them and keeping it up for pages and pages - one plays DA by clearly stating, “Let me try this line of argument even if I don’t entirely agree with it. For the moment, we’ll assume that this is true and see how it plays out.” I do that ALL THE TIME in GD and even in IMHO and MPSIMS. But you have got to own it. To do otherwise isn’t playing Devil’s Advocate, it’s being a troll. By DEFINITION, it’s being a troll. Did he get a warning? I’ll be honest, I left the thread before the end of page two because it was just too…I don’t know. It felt muddy and weird and straw-grasping from the start, and my heart just wasn’t in it.
In the reality I’ve defined for myself, mswas is a bratty imp with a blonde cowlick and a slingshot in his back pocket, who enjoys creeping up behind grown-ups and poking them in the back with a stick. When they spin around, he hides the stick behind his back and whistles while looking skyward. He is shocked and hurt by suggestions he poked them with a stick, and laments that people inevitably sink to base accusations of stick-poking because they don’t understand what he’s about. What he’s really interested in is the relationship of the stick to the tree, and that of the tree to the forest, and how photosynthesis is really an exchange of information as is everything else in the universe, which somehow proves the existence of a Creator. A precocious kid, he enjoys using impressive new words he finds in his parents’ old college textbooks (mouldering in a box beneath the basement stairs), although he doesn’t quite use them properly.
He has realized—like the boy who seeks to indict his own siblings for the unsolved crime of a broken cookie jar— that sometimes obfuscation is an asset, and clarity a hindrance.
So we’re back to steak as part of a debating tactic now.
Got it.
Let’s not forget mswas’ other inept thread, which ultimately he claimed boiled down into “Isn’t it interesting that people write books about stuff” after dropping the subtitle of “let’s see what dopers say about by sneering at atheists, without actually ever having to commit to any point whatsoever.”
Mswas, you’re a pathetic little man. You’re claim of “I was only trolling!” make it worse, not better.
Why haven’t you been banned from trolling in GD?
And somehow, in his only response to a post by Johanna, an out transgendered Doper, he somehow forgot to include her name in the otherwise perfectly coded (the first time) quote of her post.
In essence, denying Johanna her chosen identity.
No, my point was about social cohesion, was always about social cohesion, remains about social cohesion. The fact that it’s hard to make ad hominems about me in terms of social cohesion leads people to largely ignore that.
The part about liberals being intolerant of intolerance was a side-effect, not the intended point. It’s amusing and ironic, but that’s all.
People got all worked up and I didn’t take them seriously when they got worked up. -shrug- I’ve gone through and reiterated, linked to, rephrased, and quoted my arguments, to little avail. People formed an opinion about me and that was the end of it. They think that I have as much passion for the topic as they do vitriole against me or some perceived group that I belong to. This is simply not the case. Of course, this is difficult to accept for people. As I said quite early on in the thread I am all for rugged individualism, and if a transgendered person fights for their self-determination, that’s something I adamantly respect. This of course does not matter at all, because acknowledging it would make it harder to condemn me.
My sins as I see it are:
I am a troll because I wanted to make a point about social cohesion, and other people didn’t like the point I made. It’s simply ironic that I am getting such shit for violating the status quo of a bunch of people who are proposing that the status quo can sometimes be assholes.
Does anyone out there appreciate the irony as I do? Please, at least one of you must. 
(this may be a bit of a hijack to this pit thread, but here goes)
Well, they’re wrong. The ‘white’ Christian bedrock upon which the US has grown is in no danger of being erroded. Disagreement does not equal bias, and a person would be hard pressed to convince anyone without a vested interest that ‘accepting’ homosexuals puts Christianity ‘under attack.’
This is one of the most ridiculous arguments ever. ‘Pro-tolerance’ does not mean, ‘everything in the world is ok, and I just sit back and accept it.’ It sets forth a basic level of rights, civility, and oportunity (all of which is up for debate), and asserts that all people are deserving of such. Believing that people don’t have a right to discriminate, for example, is clearly in line with what it means to be ‘tolerant,’ assuming that ‘being allowed to discriminate’ is not one of the rights you have set forth as a foundation of your philosophy.
We cannot have cultural plurality? Why not? What does that mean, then? War?
Is it actually impossible, or is it maybe possible that opinions can be changed?
Isn’t it precisely “social cohesion” that got a beautiful young girl’s head bashed in, just the other day?
That’s fine, and these are the sorts of things I am into discussing.
It’s not ridiculous at all. I just want to see some people accepting that you are picking sides, and choosing who to be tolerant of and who not to be tolerant of. You can’t be pro-tolerance. You can be pro-tolerance of a chosen group. The problem is the words are being used in these vulgar block formats. “We are pro-tolerance”, or “Discrimination is bad”. It’s buzzword culture, and I expect a message board that talks as highly of itself as this one to be able to use words beyond their buzzword capacity. People discriminate all the time. I am being discriminated against in this thread. Not that I perceive myself as a victim, only that people are making a choice as it pertains to how they relate to me.
Some cultures are incompatible with others. Yes, more often than not, it does mean war.
Changing the opinion would be modifying the culture. The changed culture would be a deviation from the culture from which it was formed, and if a sizable enough chunk stayed with the ‘Orthodox’ opinion of that culture, then it would be considered schismatic.
In my opinion saying, “I am pro-tolerance”, is hippy-dippy buzzword newspeak jive. It’s relatively meaningless past the initial heartwarming feeling it gives the speaker and anyone in the audience who agrees with them. But when you put it into context it is a meaningless platitude. For instance I think it is fair to assume that we are all intolerant of pedophiles. We choose to discriminate against pedophiles in favor of a child’s innocence.
When choosing which members of this message board you like best you are ‘discriminating’.
I chose the subject matter I chose because it’s currently at the bleeding edge of the debate about tolerance and cultural acceptance. That’s the only reason I chose it. I didn’t choose it to bash transsexuals.
There was a particular transsexual on this message board that left a few years ago because she made some comment about woman sperm or something of that nature and everyone piled on her about it. She is still on my friends list on Live Journal. I think I have two transexuals on my friends list. The other person who I believe is a transsexual makes some really interesting posts about the nature of sexuality, feminism and linguistic theory.
I am unaware of the story. But, social cohesion is necessary, it is what keeps trains running, keeps the dollar effective and brings the fire department to your house. Extreme appeals to emotion don’t really tell us much about the issue.
(I know I was using extreme examples in my argument, but I was trying to get a sense of people’s boundaries on the issue.)
Where, in this thread, either of the two threads that spawned this thread, or in the history of the board in general, has anyone claimed to be “pro-tolerance?”
Sorry, I forgot not everyone had read the particular thread..
I read bits & pieces of your argument, mswas, and thought about jumping in (actually, right off the bat I was tempted to try to work a boob job joke in there somehow, but I’m not quite skilled enough).
Don’t you think we are a better People, as Americans, for digging beyond the surface in our search for commonalities? Wasn’t it just yesterday that anyone with dark skin was assumed to fit a certain role, and that role was part of the social order? Women, we were defined by the (power) majority group and told what we could be, told specifically what we needed to do in order to keep things running.
Isn’t the world a better place absent those restrictions on other people’s potential?
If someone is doing an excellent job as an employee, isn’t the employer better off tolerating that person’s need to have a sex change?
Yes, I do.
Kalhoun You’ll pardon me if I don’t lend much credence to the moral outrage of a person whose response to a microwaved baby is, “Ha ha stupid theists!”
mswas, if you think a person is intolerant if they stay where they’re not welcome , why are you still here? How can you on one hand say we have a responsibility to listen to you when you say things you think will offend us, and on the other insist that a person with a trans history is a bigot for keeping her job if her coworkers think she’s icky?
No you flaming piece of Stalin’s shit, you’re being pitted for how you went about it. Read the OP of this thread again and try to comprehend because you haven’t done it yet. You didn’t ‘upset the status quo’ with your ‘point about social cohesion’, you lied and decieved people. Likewise, Lee Harvey Oswald wasn’t arrested because he was advocating social change, he was arrested for shooting JFK.
And we don’t lend much to someone’s whose first response to a person fighting for their legal rights is, “People who are different deserve to be treated like shit.”