I would wear red. I have worn red. I admit bias towards the color blue. So?
Then why not just use “betrayal” instead of “treason”? Does using the word “treason” enhance your argument in any way? Or does it simply inject an emotional facet into your argument?
Not really. I don’t expect people to justify their opinion to my satisfaction. Just enough so I can understand where they are getting their opinion. I rarely, if ever, denigrate someone for their opinion, unless it is just utterly ridiculous like “Don’t talk to women at work so you don’t face a harassment charge” or similar.
Sorry, it’s my opinion, and I don’t have to provide cites. You aren’t sealioning here are you?
Just use “betray” then and it will avoid all the problems associated with the word “treason”.
It has nothing to do with me “liking it”. There is literally no structure that can be built to hold asylum seekers that doesn’t meet your definition of concentration camp.
I still don’t understand why people hold so dearly to certain words that others reject.
“What we did to the Kurds is treason!”
“Why do you say that? What is treasonous about it?”
“OK. What we did to the Kurds is a great betrayal!”
I’m not defending the artistic/literary quality of the cartoon. I’m just pointing out that the cartoon’s author has made it unambiguously clear that he intended the other characters’ disparagement of the sealion as a metaphor for criticizing a certain type of asshole behavior. Not for any kind of gratuitous abuse or unjustified prejudice against anybody’s “immutable characteristics”.
So yes, using the common term “sealioning” to mean a particular form of asshole behavior is the correct interpretation of the cartoon, as opposed to SlackerInc’s willfully ignorant version of it.
Yeah, and Chris Rock used to do that bit about how some types of behavior makes you an N-word. Doesn’t change the fact that it actually does refer to immutable characteristics as defined by society.
Difference being, Chris Rock didn’t *coin *the word nigger, so his opinion on whether it’s about behaviour is just his opinion.
Whereas Malki very much did *make *the comic in question, so what he says about what it refers to is the Word of God.
He wasn’t the one who verbed it, though, so its current use is not bound by the cartoon. Informed by, but not bound by. Something some people fail to grasp.
Nobody said anything about a prohibition on history writing, you ignorant cretin. The phrase “letting losers write history” doesn’t refer to the losing side being forbidden from ever writing again. It’s a figurative (sorry, is that too many syllables? Try “symbolic”) turn of phrase that has to do with who gets to set the zeitgeist – ie who decides what our cultural perception is.
Despite the fact that you refer to Washington as a slaveholding traitor, that’s not how he’s seen by our culture. People like Lee on the other hand are lionized to this day. Why is the winner Washington lionized, the loser King George mocked, and yet the loser Lee is considered a model general and Grant a failure?
And here, in a thread about sea lioning, I responded to the biggest pinniped of all. Your username should he Walrus, not Octopus. So joke’s on me – you’ll respond with a snide one liner, or just ignore this post completely. I’ve been burned a dozen times before; why do I keep trying?
He’s very, very good at this. Someone should just bung him into the cartoon instead of the sealion. Has he tried to explain why he’s actually a walrus yet? That’s always good.
Thank you for catching my drift. Losers don’t usually get to brainwash the winners with their stories… except for slavery and America. Slavers slaughtered in the Alamo are lionized and the anti-slavery Mexicans denigrated. Lionized? Slavery supporters should be sealionized. Please cite authorities showing slavery is good for the slaves. Define “happy slaves”. If slavery is good, you wouldn’t mind being enslaved, right?
If someone is sincerely interested in discussion, they don’t use the JAQing off* structure, they just talk:
“What we did to the Kurds is treason!”
“I’m uncomfortable with the term “treason” there; it has a pretty specific legal definition and I don’t see it. But it was certainly betrayal!”
See, JAQing off isn’t about getting to truth; it’s about scoring points, it’s about trying to be all alpha by putting your self in the law-professor role, it’s about making the other person admit they were wrong. I think a lot of people do it thoughtlessly, because it’s common on the internet, so that’s what they know. But generally speaking, when the JAQing starts, you know the person you are talking to will never be satisfied; they will read everything you write looking for “infiltration points” where they can raise an eyebrow and zing you. They imagine a crowd of lurkers clapping. They don’t actually care about the discussion.
*I think “JAQing off” is a much better term than “sealioning”. It perfectly captures the self-indulgent nature of the behavior.
Yes, I get that sealioning has a meaning now and it’s derived from the cartoon. However, I can’t let a negation of Death Of The Author slip by. The meaning the word has is due to common usage, not Malki telling us what his cartoon means. Malki gets to have an opinion on that, but it isn’t the final one, any more than Homer gets to have the last word on why Odysseus was like that.
The way I’ve always heard JAQing Off used goes more like this:
“Why did all the Jews pull their money out of the Twin Towers before 9/11? Why didn’t anyone shoot down the passenger planes before they could hit the buildings? Why did Bush stay with the kids instead of going out there and doing something? Why didn’t Bush act more shocked? Why wasn’t there a plane-shaped hole in the Pentagon? Why did we only get pieces instead of whole remains?”
In short, it’s asking questions in order to inject premises into a debate without having to provide any evidence for those premises. If I ask “Why were you drunk last night?” and you immediately say you haven’t ever been drunk, you look evasive and I can call you on evading the question, even though I never provided any evidence of your drunkenness; the debate is now over whether you dodge questions about your drinking, with the drinking accepted as an implicit premise you can no longer challenge.
Conspiracy theorists love JAQing Off because it allows them to deploy talking points and “debate” in a way they think ensures victory. After all, if nobody gives them the answers they want, they’re evading, and therefore dishonest, and if your opponent is dishonest that means you win and are right about everything, and they’re completely wrong. (Note: No it fucking doesn’t.)
Tru dat. SlackerInc’s still wrong though. And you know that if you start talking that Death Of The Author and descriptivist shit he’s going to go down that “then anything means anything and nothing makes any sense so I’m correct and also win !” road. Thanks, Obama.
Certain words ought to be used precisely. If the so-called nitpicking was on a word like is or what then yes you have a point. But questioning the appropriateness of using a word like treason is perfectly fine.
Are you agreeing with Manda Jo? Because she seems to imply that questioning is fine, and she does it in her example, but the poster should also add some value. So, “I’m uncomfortable with the word treason…but it was certainly betrayal” is a useful post. However, “Treason? What do you mean? Who committed treason?” is not. Especially when the questioner has a specific legalistic meaning in mind (you need an enemy in order to give aid and comfort) and doesn’t even set down the definition they’re using.
So, don’t you think Manda Jo allows for questioning the definition of, say, treason in her example? And, by adding extra useful commentary (the definition and the “betrayal”) part, that hypothetical poster avoids becoming a sea lion.
